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THE SECRET SPRINGS 



THE 

SECRET SPRINGS 

By 

Harvey O'Higgins 

Author of 
"From the Life'* Etc. 




HARPER Cff BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 



I3i^'7- 






CL^fV 



The Secret Spwngs 



Copyright, 1920, by Harvey O'HJggins 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published October, 1930 



OCT 25 1920 



^ 



©CLA59798i 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Introduction 3 

II. In Love and Marriage 15 

III. In Health 44 

IV. In Childhood 76 

V. In Happiness and Success 108 

VI. In Theodore Roosevelt 129 

VII. In Character and Conduct 153 

VIII. In Dreams 186 

IX. In Religion 216 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 
CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

**AFTER all/' Doctor X said, 'Hhe science 
l\ of medicine is beginning to be of some 
use. It is really learning how to cure/' 

This did not surprise me. I had always 
taken it for granted that medicine cured. 
But he added: 

**It is finding the secret springs of health 
and the roots of happiness." 

And that made me sit up. I knew that 
Doctor X was a diagnostician who had a high 
place in his profession. I had learned, by 
recent experience in my own person, that he 
had more medical skill than any other phy- 
sician I had been able to stumble on in some 
ten years of painful traipsing roundabout 
among them. We had struck up a visiting 
acquaintance after office hours, and I had 
found him a man of philosophic canniness in 
the discussion of human affairs. And when 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

he said that medicine was finding the ''secret 
springs*' of health and the ''roots" of happi- 
ness, naturally I began to ask eager questions. 

What were the secret springs of health? 
And what were the roots of happiness? 

His answer grew and lengthened until it 
spread itself over as many nights as the 
stories that Scheherazade told the Sultan. 
It seemed to me more interesting, too, than 
the Arabian tales. It was not merely fan- 
tastic, incredible, miraculous indeed. It was 
scientific and convincing also. It was a new 
department of human knowledge as aston- 
ishing to me as the modem wonders of elec- 
tricity might be to a man of the Middle 
Ages. And it was more than this. It was 
the explanation of a thousand mysteries in 
himian character and conduct that had puz- 
zled me as a professing fictlonist and an 
amateur student of social problems. It was 
an answer to such diverse questions as these, 
for instance: 

Why do the daughters of the rich so often marry 
chatiffeurs and the sons of peers mate with chorus 
girls? 

Why is there such peace and contentment in 
smoking tobacco or in chewing gum? 

Why does a man on the battlefield go blind with 
shell-shock and recover his sight when his hospital- 
ship is torpedoed and he jumps overboard? 

4 



INTRODUCTION 

How can a religious belief work the miracle of a 
faith cure? 

Why do young boys usually fall in love first with 
older women, and what is the attraction that elderly 
rou^ have for young girls? 

Why do we so often seem to hate most the person 
whom we most love? 

What is the source of the almost universal ad- 
miration for that great conquering enemy of man- 
kind, Napoleon Bonaparte? 

Why is an artistic genius so often the most thin- 
skinned and sensitive and yet the most arrogant of 
persons? 

Why has Puritanism so failed as a religion? And 
why do our American churches hold the women more 
easily than they hold the men? 

What is the explanation of love at first sight? 
Of the common illusion among lovers that they 
have met the beloved one in a previous exist- 
ence? Of the poets* theory that a loving couple 
are two halves of a divided personality now happily 
reunited? 

Why are so many people bom to a religious faith 
or a political opinion which they subsequently in- 
dorse and support with all the authority of reason? 

Why does a wife so often think of her husband as 
"a great child," even while he has exactly the same 
superior parental attitude toward her? 

Why are men and women such bundles of con- 
tradictions, acting against their recognized interests 
and their expressed convictions, yielding to un- 
reasonable impulses ungovernably with their eyes 

5 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

open, and blind to motives in themselves that are 
evident to everyone else in their actions? 

Why are the days of childhood looked back upon 
as "the Golden Age" of happiness and alertness of 
mind and abundant energy of body? And why do 
we so often lose all these as we grow up ? 

How does unhappiness produce ill health? Why is 
the miser so afraid of death? Why is the moment 
of success so commonly followed by deep depression? 
Why do we sigh when we are miserable, and puff out 
our chests when we are proud, and labor with our 
Itings when we feel great emotion? 

And so on, and so forth, almost without 
end! 

I do not mean that I put these riddles to 
the doctor and that he answered them. By 
no means. He talked of cases and cures, of 
the theory of medicine upon which he was 
working, and of the successful results by 
which he was proving that the theory was 
correct. As he explained, he generalized. 
He established broad conclusions about men 
and women, their minds and bodies, their 
conduct, their opinions, their characters, and 
their relations to one another. In these con- 
clusions lay the answers to the questions 
that I have instanced. But the conclusions 
themselves were no more to him than the 
generalizations about art which a painter 
might throw off in talking of how he had 

6 



INTRODUCTION 

painted one picture or another. The cure 
was the thing that interested him. A series 
of similar cures led him back to this or that 
secret spring of health, as a placer miner 
will follow traces of free gold up a stream to 
the pocket from which they have been 
washed. And out of this pocket he dug the 
generalizations, about health and character 
and happiness and conduct and opinion and 
belief, that seemed to me the richest nuggets 
of wisdom that any philosophy of life had 
ever offered me. 

I kept clamoring that the thing should be 
written. But there were difficulties. The 
ethics of the medical profession were one 
obstacle. He could not advertise himself 
and he could not let me advertise him. He 
could write of medicine only in the accepted 
manner of the profession, for publication in 
a scientific review. Useless to damn the 
ethics of the trade! All his cases came to 
him from other doctors for diagnosis. And 
advertising was of no use to him. His repu- 
tation was already so established that he had 
all the work that he could do. 

Furthermore, his whole philosophy of 
health and happiness and the wise conduct 
of life could not be well supported without 
detailing the cases from which he had derived 
it. These cases were private and confi- 

7 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

dential. He was like a priest who had 
acquired his knowledge of humanity in the 
confessional. He could not use that knowl- 
edge in his confidential ministrations or in 
the generalities of pulpit exhortation, as you 
might say. 

**And there is this about it, too," he ex- 
plained. ''In a lot of ways I'm not purely 
a doctor. I'm a sort of medicine man. I 
can't write of those aspects of my practice. 
They aren't orthodox. If the^ physicians 
who send me cases heard how I had diagnosed 
and cured some of the most difficult, they 
would suspect me of having fallen away from 
the true faith. I don't propose to be a 
medical martyr." 

And that is one of the interesting points 
about the whole affair. Doctor X is a gradu- 
ate of one of the most famous of our American 
schools of medicine, and he was a pupil of 
the most famous of our physicians. He 
began as a general practitioner and became 
a specialist in the fimctions and disorders 
of the internal glands. He was as orthodox 
as an army surgeon. Some cases of goiter, 
and of heart disease that was due to thyroid 
trouble, started him studying and experi- 
menting in the new field of morbid psy- 
chology and the emotional sources of func- 
tional disturbance. He became a doctor 

8 



INTRODUCTION 

of the mind as well as the body. He 
began to work cures in obscure and stub- 
bom cases of nervous disorder that had 
baffled him in the past; and these ctues 
were achieved by reordering the lives of 
his patients and by re-establishing their 
'* defective personalities," as he expresses it. 
He began, in fact, to make secret ex- 
cursions into the forbidden land of mind 
cures and ''mental healing'' and the mir- 
acles of faith. He went as a scientist with 
all the instruments of his profession, study- 
ing mental phenomena; but he came back 
with a lot of astonishing dicta. Such as 
these: 

A suppressed feeling of moral uncleanness will ex- 
press itself in a skin disease almost infallibly. I 
find an incredible ninnber of cases of skin disease 
that cannot be permanently cured except by curing 
the mind that causes them. 

Shame or irritation or resentment or fear shows 
itself ordinarily in the blushing or flushing or paling 
of the face. The lining skin of the body seems to 
be almost as affectible as the exterior skin. It, too, 
will register these emotions secretly, if their outward 
expression is suppressed. And it registers them as 
digestive disorders that cannot be finally cured until 
their cause has been removed from the mind. 

An instinctive emotion, being repressed, becomes 
at once entangled with that switchboard of the 
2 9 



THE SECRET SPRINGS . 

vegetative nervous system which controls the un- 
conscious bodily processes. The consequent disorder 
will produce all the symptoms of functional dis- 
turbance due to disease. 

Toxic goita: among women and certain forms of 
heart disease among men are a common fear neurosis. 
A man will react to a threat against his moral safety 
exactly as an animal will react to a threat against its 
physical safety. The moral danger in the mind 
must be removed in order to cure permanently the 
affected organ. 

Doctor X would say of himself: ** Half my 
time I'm not really a doctor. I'm a mar- 
riage adjuster." Or, '* I could make most 
of my patients well fast enough if I could 
make them happy." And once he amazed 
me by reporting: '* I can't cure So-and-so. 
He no longer believes in the immortality of 
the soul." 

The orthodox physician divides all diseases 
into two classes: they are either *'real" or 
^'imaginary." If they are real, he will 
undertake to cure them. If they are imagi- 
nary — well, they don't exist if they are 
imaginary. Doctor X's realization that no 
such line of distinction can be drawn is not 
a new discovery. It is older than the 
science of medicine itself. What I found new 
in him was this: he had largely imcovered 

lO 



INTRODUCTION 

the mechanism by which the mind affects 
the health, and he had learned how to 
protect the health from being so affected. 
He could not merely do this himself, for 
the particular disease that he was treating; 
he could also direct his patient how to save 
himself from subsequent disorders due to the 
same cause; and the sum and body of these 
directions made up his system of mental 
hygiene. It is a system that concerns itself 
not only with health, but with success in 
affairs, with happiness, with love and mar- 
riage, with one's ability to do one's work, 
with education and the training of children, 
with ethics and religion and social psy- 
chology, and even with some of the problems 
of government. 

If all this had been merely the theory of 
an argumentative philosopher, I might have 
listened politely and swallowed my yawns. 
But it was not a theory. It was a practice. 
It was a combination of diagnosis and cure. 
It was a collection of facts that permitted 
of one conclusion only. 

And the conclusion was, in part, that every 
normal human being, after the first few 
months of life, has two minds: one the 
intelligent conscious mind of which he is 
aware; the other an tinconscious animal 
mind of which he commonly knows nothing 

II 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

— not even the fact that he has it. His 
conscious mind is the mind with which he 
thinks, or believes that he thinks. His im- 
conscious mind is a mind of animal instincts, 
of inherited aptitudes, of racial traits. His 
unconscious mind governs his actions, his 
beliefs, his character, his health, and his 
happiness much more powerfully than does 
his conscious mind. Indeed, in these ac- 
tivities his conscious mind usually does 
little more than supply him with reasonable 
explanations for unreasonable actions and 
opinions which his unconscious mind has 
dictated. 

So far, here is no new discovery either. 
The late William James ascribed to Fred- 
erick Myers the credit of having first 
arrived at the scientific conception of this 
"subliminal self." But before it was ac- 
cepted by scientific psychologists it was 
vaguely recognized by many poets and 
philosophers. The Russian novelist Dos- 
toievsky, for example, not only illustrated 
it in his characterizations, but accurately 
described it in his analysis of the motives 
of many of his heroes. Bergson made good 
use of the theory of the imconscious mind 
throughout his Creative Evolution^ and par- 
ticularly in his pages on instinct and in- 
telligence. And, most famous of all, Freud 

12 



INTRODUCTION 

and his following of psychoanalysts have 
founded a whole school of psychology and 
of medicine upon it, and contributed an 
enormous library of research and argument 
to its study and imderstanding. 

If found that Doctor X was well aware of 
all this previous research and that he had 
availed himself of everything in the Freudian 
theory that could help him. But be was not 
a Freudian. He was not purely a psycho- 
analyst. Unlike the Freudians, he did not 
confkie himself to studying chiefly the sup- 
pressions of the sex instinct in the sub- 
conscious mind. He had found that the 
suppression of any one of a half-dozen other 
instincts would affect the health in exactly 
the same way. And, by this enlargement 
of the Freudian theory, he took the curse of 
excessive sexuality off the unconscious mind, 
and he made it possible to discuss the whole 
business, without offense, in unprofessional 
print. 

I kept insisting, as I say, that it should 
be so discussed — that a matter of such im- 
portance to the common man should be 
made known to him. And out of that in- 
sistence the following book has finally arisen. 
I have protected Doctor X from a breach of 
professional ethics by concealing his name. 
I have so disguised my accounts of his cases 

13 



THE, SECRET SPRINGS 

that his patients themselves would not 
recognize them. I have not attempted to 
be scientific, or exhaustive, or authoritative. 
I have tried merely to make clear and in- 
teresting to the average lay mind a depart- 
ment of science so important and so 
revolutionary that it is perhaps the greatest 
addition made to the sum of human knowl- 
edge since Darwin formulated his theory 
of evolution and the descent of man. 



CHAPTER II 

IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

THERE came, one day, to Doctor X, a 
very able and well-known lawyer who 
had apparently been breaking under a strain 
of overwork. ' ^ As a matter of fact, ' ' Doctor X 
says, '*I soon learned from conversation with 
him that the strain was probably caused by 
a weight of unhappiness in his married life. 
In treating him, I noticed that he had an 
odd interest in the subject of hands. He 
remarked mine, which, he said, gave him 
a feeling of confidence and security . . . 
although my hands are rather delicate than 
powerful. He declared that he could read 
character from hands, particularly the char- 
acter of a woman. His own hands were 
immaculately cared for and always freshly 
manicured. When I met his wife I noticed 
that she had hands of remarkable beauty 
and that she was rather proudly conscious 
of them. I concluded that he had probably 
made her so by his praise of them." 

It seemed evident that this interest in 
15 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

hands indicated some peculiarity in the 
mental life of the patient, but he was im- 
aware of the origin of it. He could only 
offer the explanation that he looked at hands 
as an index of character. Then, in talking 
to Doctor X about the circumstances of his 
marriage, he related an illuminating incident. 

He recalled that the first time he met his 
wife he was at a card party with a yoimg 
woman to whom he was then engaged. 
They played cards at the same table, his 
fiancee playing as his partner, opposite him, 
and his future wife playing as the partner 
of his opponent. His fiancee did not play 
well. His future wife played with great 
success. He became irritable with the girl 
to whom he was engaged, and before the 
evening ended he quarreled with her and she 
gave him back his engagement ring. Within 
a week he transferred the ring to the finger 
of his present wife. 

Doctor X said, *' Your wife has a remark- 
ably beautiful hand.'* 

''Yes," he said. "I think her hands were 
what first attracted me to her. Do you 
know, when we were playing cards that 
night, I could hardly keep my eyes off them ! '' 

"And your fiancee,'* the doctor asked, 
''were her hands pretty?'* 

He stared and blinked a moment. "That's 
i6 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

f tinny," he said. "I was just thinking of 
the contrast between them — ^and how it 
showed at the card table. She had very 
short, stubby fingers, and the index finger 
of her right hand was withered. I remember 
the thing got on my nerves. I wanted to 
stop playing rather than have her expose it.*' 

''A psychologist,'' Doctor X said, ** would 
conclude that you had translated a criticism 
of her hands into a complaint about the way 
in which she 'played her hands.' " 

He thought it over. ''Undoubtedly," he 
agreed. ''I felt at the time that I was un- 
reasonable — irritable — impatient — but I 
couldn't control myself." 

'' Now, tell me," Doctor X said, *' what is it 
that has given you this fixation about hands? 
It must have occurred very early in your 
childhood. If it wasn't your mother, it may 
have been yotir father, or a nurse, or some 
relative who took the place of a parent — 
some aunt, perhaps. What?" 

He had been slowly shaking his head, 
reflectively. Suddenly he stopped. His face 
lit up. ''I know!" he said. ''I know! It 
was that vase!" 

"A vase?" 

"Yes. A vase. It used to belong to my 
mother. It's a very beautifully carved 
marble hand — a, woman's hand — holding a 

17 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

cornucopia. My old nurse used to give it 
to me to play with. I have it yet. It's on 
my library mantelpiece at home. It was 
my mother's, and, for a long time, I had the 
idea that it was really a copy of my mother's 
hand. She had died of tuberculosis when 
I was about a year old, and before she died 
she wrote a letter to me and asked them to 
give it to me as soon as I was able to read. 
And she told me good-by in it, and asked 
me not to forget her. Naturally, that letter 
meant a lot to me, and for a long time 
I used to think, ' That's the hand that wrote 
the letter' — and take it to bed with me 
when I was lonely — after I had been licked 
or anything — you know — tintil at last some 
one foimd me with it and told me it wasn't 
her hand at all ... I had forgotten all about 
it. . . . Funny thing! Even now, when I 
think of her letter I think of that marble 
hand as having written it." 

Funny thing, indeed. He had been in 
fact married, unawares, by a marble hand. 
"It not only broke off his engagement to a 
girl with whom he might have been happy," 
Doctor X points out. ' ' It married him blindly 
to a girl with whom happiness, for him, was 
practically impossible, because he was de- 
manding that she be a self-sacrificing, 
motherly, and devoted woman, and she 

i8 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

never had been, and never could be, that 
sort of person. He fell in love with her at 
first sight — 'compulsively,' as we say. If 
anyone at the card table could have seen 
into his mind and warned him against being 
hypnotized by a pair of pretty hands, he 
would probably have replied: 'She's a 
beautiful character — I can tell it by her 
hands. I know it intuitively. IVe always 
been that way.'" 

Intuitively ! That is the word. When we 
say^we know a thing "intuitively" we mean 
that we know it without knowing how we 
know it — ^by some mental faculty that is not 
reason, nor deduction, nor conscious thought 
at all. And by so saying we recognize the 
existence of what science now calls '*the 
subconscious mind." But if it is from this 
subconscious mind that we get our "intui- 
tions," where does the subconscious mind 
get them? Where did the lawyer, the slave 
of the marble hand, get his "intuition" 
about hands? 

When you fall asleep you lose conscious- 
ness. Your conscious mind ceases to work. 
It rests and is refreshed. But you dream. 
Some part of your mind continues to work 
busily, imagining scenes, inventing or recall- 
ing incidents, enjoying fantastic adventures. 
You may remember these when you wake 

19 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

up or you may not. That is to say, your 
conscious mind may have some knowledge 
of them or it may not. They are an affair 
of the subconscious mind, the dream mind. 

It is from the study of dreams that Freud 
has worked out the knowledge of the sub- 
conscious mind that he has given us. We 
find that the subconscious mind has a record 
of memories that have been lost from the 
conscious mind or were never registered on 
it. We find that the subconscious mind 
even preserves a picture of events that 
occurred in infancy before the child had 
developed any reasoning intelligence what- 
ever. And among those pictvires we find 
the "mother image," the indelible but im- 
conscious picture of the person upon whom 
our first instinctive love was centered. 

Anything astonishing about that? Surely 
not. It is perfectly natural that in the 
normal man's mind the image of his mother 
should persist as a loved ideal. But the 
curious thing is that the image is not an 
ideal of character and qualities and attri- 
butes. It is merely an image. It has merely 
physical characteristics of height and fea- 
tures, hands and eyes, this sort of nose and 
that color of hair. And just as, in the 
child, the sight of his mother started up the 
whole emotion of instinctive love, so, in 

20 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

later years, the sight of any physical charac- 
teristic of the mother may have the same 
effect on him. 

That is why the lawyer was married by a 
marble hand. His '* mother image*' had 
been formed aroimd that one feature, a 
beautifiil hand. The sight of such a hand 
aroused in him all the emotion of instinctive 
affection. He was unaware of this, because 
it took place in his unconscious mind. He 
explained it to himself by argtiing that hands 
were an index to character. He had for- 
gotten about the marble hand. He did not 
remember it until Doctor X*s questions re- 
called it to him and brought it back from his 
imconscious memory. 

Does all this seem far-fetched ? Well, let us 
leave it for a moment and go with Doctor X. 
He has a patient who was married not by 
a marble hand, but by a red lamp. 

*'He is rather imusual,'* Doctor X says, 
''because he remembers quite clearly the 
mother image which he carried in his mind 
in his boyhood days. It was a picture of 
his mother as a beautiful young woman, 
slender and graceful, with smiling brown eyes 
and wavy hair. I wished to follow the 
replacement of that image in his mind by 
the image of the imaginary sweetheart, who 
usually succeeds the mother image in the 

21 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

adolescent daydream. And I asked him 
whether he had ever had a mental picture 
of an ideal girl in his youth.** 

He could not recall any. No. He had 
been a penniless boy, with no prospect of 
marriage, and he had never attempted to 
picture to himself the sort of yovmg woman 
who would be his ideal. 

He was sure of that, until Doctor X spoke 
of her not as an ideal girl, but as "a dream 
girl." 

"Oh yes," he said. **0f course. Ire- 
member! I remember the red lamp.** 

"Red lamp?'* 

"Yes. I used to see her standing under 
a hanging lamp, a sort of Turkish lamp, in 
a kind of Turkish room, with rugs and 
tapestries — all of it in a red glow from 
above.** He was describing it amusedly. 
"The light made her look like a perfect 
peach — shining on her hair — sort of wavy 
hair — and her eyes were brown, in the 
shadow, and she was — oh, gee, she was 
certainly a pippin! I remember, I used to 
say to myself: *No, you don*t! No such 
luck for you, boy ! * And say, when I saw — ** 

He stopped. He looked at the doctor 
queerly. 

"Why, that's so!** he said. "I*d for- 
gotten that! Well, I'll be jiggered.** 

22 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

'' Forgotten what? *' 

'*Why, the first time I took Alice home 
from a dance." (Alice is his wife.) *'I had 
never been in the house before, and they 
had one of those red lamps in the hall — a 
big entrance hall with Turkish rugs and 
hangings — and when she took off her evening 
cloak and stood with the red light shining 
on her hair that way, smiling as she said 
good night to me, it just went through me 
like — ^well, I think, if Td been able to find 
my voice, I'd have proposed to her on the 
spot. I know I went away convinced that 
she was the one woman in the world for 
me. And I was right. WeVe been as 
happy as any two people ever could be." 

Apparently he had never before connected 
the lamp in the hall with the lamp in his 
dream; and he had never noticed the like- 
ness between the real girl and the dream 
girl — ^much less related either of them to the 
''mother image" with its "smiling brown 
eyes and wavy hair." When Doctor X 
asked him whether his wife reminded him 
of his mother at all he replied: '* No. Not 
at all. Not in any way." 

Subsequently he spoke rather impa- 
tiently of one of his wife's characteristics; 
that she was always oversympathetic with 

people "not her own sort of people," 

23 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

He said: ''She always goes out of her 
way to say 'Good morning' to the park 
policeman, and stops to talk to -hose 
neglected-looking kids you see on the street, 
and she used to take flower seeds up to an 
old flagman on a railroad crossing." 

"And that irritates you?'' the doctor 
asked. 

"No,** he said, "it doesn't irritate me 
exactly, but — I don't know. I feel sort of 
jealous, I think." 

It seemed an odd groimd for jealousy. 
The doctor changed the subject, but a few 
moments later — when he was sure that his 
patient had forgotten the connection — he 
asked, "Were you ever jealous of your 
mother — as a boy?" 

"Sure I was," he laughed. "I remember, 
once, when I saw her kiss a neighbor's boy 
I was so sore I laid for the kid and beat him 
up." 

That would account for his feeling about 
his wife's interest in the children on the 
street. But what about the park policeman 
and the others? 

"I mean older people," Doctor X said — 
"poor people and men in uniform." 

"Well," he recollected, "I came home 
from school one day and found mother with 
a couple of policemen in the dining room, 

24 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

giviHig them coffee and sandwiches. There 
had been a fire up the street, and they were 
drip;^>ing water all over everything. I think 
that was what made me mad — the way they 
were mussing things up. And the fire was 
out, and I thought to myself, ' I guess they 
weren't such a pair of heroes, even if they 
did get wet, * and I didn't see why she was 
making such a fuss about them." 

''It was characteristic of her, was It?*' 
the doctor asked, *'to do things for people, 
that way?*' 

'*0h yes," he said. ''She was a good 
deal like my wife in that respect." 

Here, then, was another subconscious 
mother image that had acted as a match- 
maker. But you will notice that the young 
lover, in his daydreams, had added a red 
lamp, and that the lamp became the "sym- 
bol" by which the emotion of love was 
exploded in him. You will notice, too, that 
he was jealous of his wife whenever she 
duplicated an action that had made him 
jealous of his mother, although it was absurd 
for him to be jealous of such actions in his 
wife, and he knew it. 

"An actual living parent is not necessary," 

Doctor X points out, "to form this parent 

image. It may be formed from pictures, or 

the reports of others; or it may take the 

3 25 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

aspect of a nurse or a guardian. But, once 
formed, it becomes the starting signal for 
the emotion of love forever after; and if 
that emotion is complicated by other emo- 
tions in childhood, those emotions, too, will 
be started irresistibly. That is the reason 
why my patient of the red lamp was jealous 
of his wife whenever she did anything that 
made him jealous of his mother/' 

The love image, as I have said, is carried 
as a picture, not as a thought. It is not 
consciously present in the mind. It has not 
the attributes of a character so much as 
the outward appearance of a person. Con- 
sequently all the emotions of love may be 
sprung on the conscious mind of a young 
man or woman by the appearance in reality 
of some fragment of the unconscious image 
— like the red lamp or the beautiful hand. 

That is Doctor X*s explanation of love 
at first sight. The lawyer at the card table 
was instantly and irresistibly attracted by 
the beautiful hands. They started up in 
him the whole mighty emotion of instinctive 
love. Neither his engagement to another 
woman nor the obvious shortcomings of the 
new object of his affections could save him 
from the overpowering impulse of attrac- 
tion. This is probably why we say, "Love is 
blind." It is the unconscious, unreasoning, 

26 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

instinctive mind that is operating, and the 
reasoning mind joins it only to explain, to 
make reasonable, to ''rationalize*' (as the 
psychologists say) the emotions by which 
reason is stampeded — ^just as the lawyer had 
rationalized the effect of fine hands on his 
affections by argtiing that hands are an index 
of character. 

And the presence of this dream image in 
the subconscious mind accotmts also for 
some other common delusions of love. 

It accotmts, for instance, for the ro- 
mantic belief of the poet that he has met 
his beloved one in another life. ''When I 
was a king in Babylon and you were a 
Christian slave — '' That other life is the 
dream life of the subconscious mind, in 
which the poet has known the image that 
now appears before him in the person of his 
sweetheart. 

It accounts for the poetical theory that 

the lover is in search of the other half of his 

incomplete personality, and that true love 

consists in the imion of two halves of a 

personality fitting as perfectly as the divided 

coin of the lovers in the fairy tale. The two 

halves that fit are the actual image of the 

sweetheart and the dream image in the 

lover's mind. 

And it accounts for many of those ro- 
27 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

mantic mysteries, and compulsions, and de- 
moniac powers that have been attributed 
to the god of young love — the power to 
delude, to overwhelm reason, to nullify ex- 
perience, and generally to make the lover 
behave like a victim of hypnosis, a blind 
puppet, a ridiculous marionette. 

Doctor X says: ''I have a patient who has 
been ideally happy in her married life. She 
was also ideally happy with her father. 
She tells me: /He never criticized a woman 
in his life. I could always go to him and 
get anything I wanted. He never whipped 
me. He was always frank. I never had 
reason to hide anything from him.' *' 

He died when she was sixteen. Doctor X 
wished to trace the transference of this father 
image to her husband. He asked how she 
had come to marry. 

"I always had lots of admirers,'* she said, 
^'but I never had any preference for any of 
them until I met Royce.'' Royce is her 
husband. ''I liked him the moment he 
stepped on the dancing floor. He was tall 
and dark and slender. He had the best face. 
And there was an air of absolute cleanliness 
about him that I learned later was true of 
his mind as well." 

''How tall was he?'* the doctor asked. 

''He's six feet two." 
28 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

'*His clean-mindedness was like your 
father^s?" 

"Yes. Exactly." 

*'What was your father like, physically?" 

"He was tall and dark and slender. He 
wore a beard, but he had clean-cut features." 

"How do you know? Did you ever see 
him without the beard?" 

"No, but mother had a picture of him as 
a young man, and he had the cleanest face." 

"How tall was he?" 

"Six feet three inches." 

Here the role and make-up were all ready 
for the actor who could carry them off. 
The moment he stepped on the stage the 
heroine of the love drama began at once to 
play her part opposite him. Since he de- 
veloped the necessary qualities of character 
to stabilize the instinctive attraction, the 
love has been permanent and the happiness 
enduring. 

It is not always necessary, however, for 
the actor to have the necessary qualities of 
character. By some mechanism of projec- 
tion, those qualities may be stripped from 
the dream man and foisted upon the lover. 
He may be dressed up in the borrowed 
garments of the heroine's mental image with- 
out the least discomfort to her. She will 

be blind to his faults, without any sense of 

29 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

discrepancy. And she will impute to him 
lofty qualities of soul which everyone else 
will be skeptical about — even his own mother. 

The girl will be quite imaware that she is 
carrying this property tnmk around with 
her. She will not know what she has put 
in it or why. She has' filled it with qualities 
that were originally her father's, and later 
were romantically made over and retrimmed 
in daydreams and fantasies. The matinee 
infatuations of yoimg girls usually serve in 
the latter process. And it is an extremely 
valuable process, for it adapts the father 
image to the new drama of adolescent love, 
and prepares the girl for a relation with her 
husband that has not been rehearsed in her 
relations with her father. This change in 
the image is called a "rejuvenation.'* 

But suppose the rejuvenation does not 
occur or is incomplete. What then? 

Doctor X has a patient, a married woman, 
who came to him to be treated for various 
physical ailments that need not concern us 
here. The point is that she considered her- 
self very unhappy in her married life. "I 
felt this morning," she said, tragically, "that 
I simply couldn't live with my husband 
another day.'* 

Why not? 

It was not at all clear why not. The 
30 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

grievances that she had against him seemed 
small enough. They amotmted to the fact 
that he was the sort of man he was, and not 
some other sort of man. 

The doctor changed the conversation by- 
asking her whether her father was still alive. 

"No," she replied. "He died when I was 
only three years old.'* 

"Tell me," he said, "what would be your 
ideal of a husband? Describe him to me — 
his physical characteristics." 

She described him rather vividly, laughing. 

He returned to the question of her hus- 
band again and his faults. Then he asked, 
"What did your father look like?" 

She replied with an equally vivid de- 
scription of her father, although he had 
died when she was so young that she could 
not possibly have remembered him. And, 
stranger still, her description of her father 
was, almost word for word, a repetition of 
her description of her ideal of a husband. 

Doctor X pointed out this oddity to her. 
She seemed bewildered by it. She did not 
know where she had acquired the vivid picture 
of her father. "I thought I remembered 
him that way," she said, "but, of course, 
I don't. I couldn't. I was too yoimg." 

"Evidently," he suggested, "you have 
invented in your childhood a * father image' 

31 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

that represented your ideal of what a father 
ought to be/' 

''Yes," she said. ''Evidently that's just 
what IVe done/' 

"And in your later youth you have un- 
consciously accepted that ideal of a father 
as your ideal of a husband." 

"I suppose I have," she agreed, more 
doubtfully. "It certainly seems that way." 

"Well, then," the doctor said, "does it 
occtir to you that you are unhappy with yotir 
husband because he is not your ideal of a 
father?" 

No. She would not admit that. She 
argued against it. It was as a husband that 
he had failed. 

Doctor X left the matter with her. 

The next time he saw her she said: "I 
have been thinking over what you suggested 
about my husband. I believe you were 
right. I've really been asking him to father 
me." She laughed. "As a matter of fact, 
I don't think he's half bad as a husband — 
as husbands go." 

That is a very simple instance of one of 
the commonest causes of imhappiness in 
married life. Let us go a cut deeper in the 
matter. 

"I have a patient," Doctor X says, "a 
woman who married an unrejuvenated 

32 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

father image. That was a mental regression 
on her part, due to the failure of a youthful 
love affair in which the image had been 
rejuvenated as an ideal lover. Unhappy be- 
cause of the failure of this love affair, she 
had repressed the memory of it, and the 
ideal image had been carried down in the 
repression — as it often is. The father image 
had replaced it — as it often does. When 
she was about to marry her present husband 
her mother warned her, 'He is just like 
your father, and he has always been difficult." 

Her father had, in fact, been short- 
tempered, critical, and unjust. Once, when 
she was about seven years old, he had 
accused her of something of which she had 
not been guilty, and in a rage, without 
letting her explain, he had spanked her in 
the presence of a boy friend. The indignity 
was almost unendurable. It had remained 
in her memory as the picture symbol of 
parental injustice. But she had all a young 
girFs instinctive love for her father. She 
had repressed her anger and resentment. 
It remained in her subconscious mind as a 
mass of undrained emotion — as an ''affect," 
as the psychologists say. 

One evening, at the dinner table, her 
husband wrongly accused her of something 
that had been done by a servant, and he 

33 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

spoke angrily to her in the presence of a 
dinner guest. By so doing he accurately 
reproduced the scene that had occurred with 
her father. There followed a volcanic erup- 
tion out of all proportion to the cause of it. 
All the undrained emotions of her relations 
with her father were set free. And they 
remained free, thereafter, in her relations 
with her husband. Any sort of happiness 
with him became practically impossible, 
because, loving him as she had loved her 
father, she felt all the resentment and anger 
and dislike against him that she had stored 
up, unexpended, against her father. 

** Moreover,'' the doctor says, ''her feelings 
against her father had accumulated in a 
sense of humiliation that showed in blushing 
in her girlhood, though the blushing was of a 
transitory character. As a consequence of 
her imhappy relations with her husband, 
she developed chronic blushing — a, so-called 
vasomotor reaction in which the congestion 
and painful beating of the blood vessels of 
face and neck led her physician to believe 
that she had a thyroid disturbance. It was 
on this diagnosis that she came to me. 

"I found that she had no thyroid trouble. 
She was physically healthy. She was suffer- 
ing only with the psychic conflict that had 
resulted from marrying an unrejuvenated 

34 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

father image. She was cured by bringing 
that conflict into her conscious mind and 
resolving it, with her husband's aid.'* 

Let us put aside, for the present, the 
question of how such a conflict can be cured 
by '* bringing it into the conscious mind." 
Let us leave out of immediate consideration 
the whole matter of disease and its treat- 
ment by such methods. Let us confine 
ourselves to the question of how this sub- 
conscious love image and the emotions 
attached to it affect the happiness of married 
life. 

The case that I have just described is 
evidently a somewhat abnormal example 
of what is a fairly common situation. We 
have all, I suppose, been puzzled by the 
amount of irritation that often develops be- 
tween husband and wife over some ap- 
parently trivial matter. We call it "a 
tempest in a teapot." The most devoted 
love does not seem capable of saving them 
from moments of the most furious anger and 
resentment. The cause may be as small as 
a teapot, but the tempest can be a home- 
wrecking tornado. The one whom we most 
love we seem to be capable of most hating. 
Why? 

The child's first love is for its parents. 
But its parents are also its first guides and 

35 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

critics. They give it its first discipline. If 
they are harsh, iinjust, or cruel, the emotion 
of love in that child will always be accom- 
panied by suppressed emotions of resent- 
ment, anger, or even hate, that may easily 
come to the surface. In later years, when 
the childhood love for the parent has been 
transformed into the adult love for husband 
or wife, there is a weaker repression of the 
antagonistic emotions, and they well up 
tingovemably imder any criticism, or un- 
kindness, or injustice. 

Moreover, in the happier moods of married 
life the inheritance of the childhood love 
complicates the married relation. The hus- 
band will have moments in which he will 
want his wife to be a mother to him; he will 
love her and obey her childishly — ^par- 
ticularly when he is ill. The wife will have 
similar moments, in which she will be happy 
to act as if her husband were her father — 
particularly if she has involved herself in 
difficulties with financial affairs. Obviously, 
these moments will conflict. The wife who 
is most consistently daughter-like and duti- 
ful will also know that her husband is 
^'nothing but a great child,'' because she 
has observed him in moods when he de- 
manded mothering. And the husband will 
be enraged to find himself treated as if he 

36 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

were a child at times when he wishes to 
be obeyed as if he were a father. The whole 
relationship will be difficult because the 
emotions of it are unstable and inconsistent. 

The man whose mother has been self- 
sacrificing and domestic will demand similar 
qualities in his wife. If his mother has not 
been his intellectual equal, he will find it 
difficult to accept his wife as an intellectual 
companion and to share his mental life with 
her. The wife will find similar conflicts 
arising out of the subconscious influences of 
her past relations with her father. 

''The situation would be impossible/* 
Doctor X philosophizes, '4f it were not that 
love in the normal man or woman is a 
duplex emotion seeking a double goal. It 
contains the instinctive desire to give pro- 
tection as well as to receive protection. 
Sexual love is merely the explosive force that 
serves to blast away all the obstacles that 
stand between the lover and the loved. It 
intensifies the ftmdamental reaction. It 
serves to anchor love in the primal sources 
of being. In the service of protective love, 
it is a willing giant that sublimates its 
energy in the highest forms of cultural de- 
velopment. But in the absence of protective 
love, it is about as dependable as a floating 
mine. It is not a goal in itself; and if it 

37 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

be made a goal personality soon crumbles. 
But, if protective love is the ideal aimed at, 
the sex instinct automatically takes its 
place as naturally as a kiss or a caress. 
Without that ideal, sex love is as disastrous 
as free dynamite. Food craving has its 
value in the goal which food-given strength 
enables you to attain. Sex craving has its 
value in the goal of home happiness and 
race happiness which sex-given strength en- 
ables you to attain in mate and children.** 

It is there that Doctor X*s theory and 
practice diverge most widely from the 
Freudian emphasis on sex. I shall have to 
return to that question later and take it 
up at length. Meantime, I wish to give a 
few more examples of the subconscious in- 
fluence of a parent image causing unhap- 
piness in married life. 

J is a contractor whom Doctor X once 
treated for a disease that need not come into 
the story. His father had been a tyrant to 
both mother and son. He had opposed the 
boy's education, and J had been given only 
one year's schooling. His antagonism to- 
ward his father and his sympathy for his 
mother had overweighted his instinctive 
love for her. He ran away from home at 
seventeen, and within a year he was earning 
enough to take his mother away from his 

38 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

father's tyranny and support her. She 
lived with him until her death, which 
occurred when he was forty- two years old. 
Three years later, at forty-five, he married a 
widow of forty. 

The probability of an unrejuvenated 
mother image in this case was so great that 
the doctor hazarded the suggestion, **Your 
wife markedly resembles your mother, 
doesn't she?*' 

**Why, yes!" he said. **How did you 
know? I have a photo of my mother in 
the dining room, and everyone always takes 
it for a picture of my wife." 

The father's oppression had given him a 
feeling of inferiority from which he had 
never recovered, and that feeling had greatly 
hampered his career. The unrejuvenated 
mother image had made him imhappy with 
his wife. Strangest of all, he was repeating 
his own father's tyranny in his relations 
with his stepson — his wife's son by her 
previous marriage. He was so imkind to 
this boy of seventeen that the stepson had 
threatened to nm away from home. 

'*The philosophers," Doctor X comments, 
'* maintain that experience is the best teacher. 
I find that the subconscious mind learns 
nothing by experience. It reduplicates the 
drama of its childhood over and over, even 

39 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

though the drama ends again and again in 
tragedy." 

Another patient, a married woman, came 
to Doctor X, a nervous wreck, always 
depressed and unhappy, morbidly anxious, 
miserable in her married life, and afflicted 
with a nervous trembling whenever she heard 
a bell. The drama of her tragic marriage 
had begun at breakfast one morning, when 
her husband criticized her for having spilled 
a spoonful of porridge on the tablecloth. 
She had scarcely had a happy moment with 
him since. Incredible? She had developed 
a phobia for bells. Why? She felt that 
she could never be happy, that there was 
nothing in life for her, that all her natural 
affection had died in her and had been 
replaced by a cold sense of fear. 

The doctor found that she had been an 
intensely affectionate child, but her father 
had been a stem and imdemonstrative man, 
and her mother had been too busy or too 
cold to accept her caresses. At a very 
early age she devoted herself to a baby 
which she used to nurse and care for. When- 
ever her own mother neglected her she 
found relief for her injured feelings in lavish- 
ing her affection on this infant. For some 
reason — which she could not recall — the 
sound of a ragpicker's bell always threw the 

40 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

baby into paroxysms of fear, and it was her 
great delight to comfort the infant and 
reassure it. 

'*It is necessary to notice here/' Doctor 
X says, **that such a child's attachment for 
a baby is not a manifestation of the maternal 
instinct. The little girl identifies herself 
with the infant and plays a dual mother- 
child role. That is why my patient, by 
tenderly caring for the baby, recompensed 
herself for her mother's neglect. It is the 
reason also why the baby's fear of a bell 
subsequently reproduced itself in her own 
fear of bells." 

The baby died. Disconsolate, she turned 
to a parrot, and the parrot died. She de- 
veloped a passion for paper dolls, but she 
made a litter of paper, cutting them out, 
and her mother threw them in the fire, 
declaring that she couldn't have the house 
messed up with such trash. All her attempts 
at affection or self-assertion were met with 
criticism. She heard her neighbors call her 
the ugly one of the family. Her teachers 
seemed to dislike her. ' And so forth. 

''By this time, of course," the doctor 
explains, ''she was imputing to the outer 
world actions to account for unreasonable 
and instinctive feelings in herself." 

She was very shy and self-conscious. One 
4 41 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

day, while she was handing an eraser to a 
boy in the classroom, a teacher misunder- 
stood what she was doing and shamed her 
before the whole class by accusing her of 
holding hands. Moreover, she was reported 
to her mother. From that time on she 
felt that she ** would rather die" than be 
seen talking to a boy. She became reserved, 
lonesome, hypersensitive to criticism— deeply 
affectionate, but morbidly unable either to 
show affection or win it. 

In this state she fell in love with the 
young man whom she finally married. The 
period of her engagement was happy beyond 
words. She felt that at last she had found 
the absolutely uncritical protection of a 
great love. On her honeymoon her happi- 
ness seemed greater than ever. And then 
she spilled porridge on the tablecloth, and 
her husband reproved her irritably. 

Presto! The whole structure of conscious 
happiness came ttmibling down in ruins, 
wrecked by an explosion of the subconscious 
emotions in the cellar of her mind. She 
began to re-enact with her husband the 
early drama of her relations with her parents. 
Every bell that she heard became the rag- 
picker's bell, warning her never to love, be- 
cause her love was always to be rejected, 
disastrous, tragical. All the morbid fears 

42 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

and repressions of her childhood flooded her 
mind, and nothing that her husband cotild 
do was of any avail to reassure her. 

This is an abnormal and exaggerated case, 
but it will serve to show the strength of 
subconscious influences on married hap- 
piness. Let me give, finally, an example 
of complete and incurable imhappiness in 
marriage as the result of a subconscious, 
infantile ** fixation*' of affection. 

Mrs. K is an Irishwoman of forty who 
came to Doctor X to be treated for a chronic 
headache. She had been bom in Ireland, 
one of twelve children, and at the age of 
ten her overburdened mother had given her 
sole charge of her baby brother. For ten 
years she had raised this boy as if he were 
her own child. The other sisters had gone 
to school, but she had insisted on staying 
home to help with the housework and care 
for the baby. She cried if she were separated 
from him. Although she was the hand- 
somest girl of the family, healthy and 
amiable, at twenty years of age she had no 
beaus and did not encourage any. She was 
wholly devoted to her small brother. 

Then her parents forced her to leave home 
and come to America. She was desperately 
unhappy and homesick here. She developed 
various diseases, and finally, after eight 

43 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

years, found herself with ''a gastro-intestinal 
ulcer/' so weak and emaciated that she 
returned to Ireland to die. 

In her home and in the company of her 
brother — ^now eighteen years old — she mi- 
raculously regained her health. In four 
months she was completely cured. He 
wished to come to America, so they re- 
turned together. He married, and so did 
she. But she was unhappy in her married 
life and greatly afflicted with headaches. 
Her health became so bad that she went 
West to visit her brother; her headaches 
stopped, and she became as ^'fat as a pig/* 
she said. 

Her brother died. As the residt of a fall 
from a street car, her headaches became 
incessant. Nothing relieved them, and when 
Doctor X first saw her her head had been 
aching continously for nearly ten years. 

''An illness of this type," he says, ''follow- 
ing an injury, is commonly blamed on the 
accident. In reality, the injury is only the 
last blow that breaks down the weakened 
machine. No physician had been able to 
find any physical cause for Mrs. K's head- 
ache. There was none. She was wholly 
miserable in her married life because her 
brother had become the fixed symbol of all 
happiness values for her. The fixation was 

44 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

qmte unconscious. She only knew that she 
had been happy with him and that she was 
absolutely unhappy without him. She was 
quite imaware of the secret of her ill health. 

''I find that the conversion of a mental 
pain into a bodily pain is a conmion device 
for freeing the mind of unbearable distress. 
The body is readily sacrificed to save the 
mind. If the conversion does not occur, 
to accomplish this indirect drainage, the 
mind may break down. I was convinced 
that if we removed Mrs. K's headache, 
insanity would certainly follow. In any case, 
happiness in her married life was quite im- 
possible for her. She should never have 
married.*' 

These, then, are a few of the cases on which 
Doctor X foimds his modified Freudian 
theory of the existence of the subconscious 
love image and its influence in love and 
marriage. I shall have to return to the 
subject again when we come to the question 
of the unconscious origins of ill health. Let 
me conclude, for the time being, with a few 
more examples of how the presence of this 
ideal love image in the unconscious mind 
explains some of the puzzling phenomena 
of courtship and married life. 

Why, when we "marry in haste,*' do we 
usually "repent at leisure"? Because love 

45 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

at first sight is an emotional explosion that 
bears little or no relation to the object 
causing it, and repentance follows when the 
discrepancy develops in the intimacy of 
marriage. 

Why are late marriages so often unhappy? 
Because the person who does not marry 
young has usually been a devoted son or 
daughter, and an unrejuvenated mother 
image or father image thwarts the growth of 
a happy married relation. 

Why do the daughters of the rich so often 
elope with chauffeurs and the sons of the 
English aristocracy marry chorus girls? 
Because the children of the rich are so often 
left to the sole care of servants at the time 
when the love image is being formed in the 
subconscious mind. As a consequence, a 
chauffeur or a chorus girl, reproducing some 
characteristic of this debased image, sets 
the spark to the whole train of instinctive 
love. 

Why is a girl who was a coquette before 
marriage so rarely contented in her married 
life? Because her coquetry was due to a 
lack of fixation in her ideal image, and this 
instability commonly persists even after her 
conscious loyalty has been deeply engaged. 

The marriage of mature judgment, or 
the marriage of convenience, often fails be- 

46 



IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE 

cause the ideal image has not been consulted. 
That is true, also, of all arranged marriages, 
all loveless marriages. It is the defect of 
the continental marriage, and it is one of the 
reasons, perhaps, why infidelity so often 
ensues there — the ideal image seeks its 
counterpart outside of wedlock. 

The perfect marriage would seem to be 
the one that follows soon after adolescence, 
when the parent image has been rejuvenated 
in adolescent fantasies and the subconscious 
instinct of race perpetuation is allowed its 
natural fulfillment. That instinct, blocked 
by the common measures of birth control, 
dams up in undrained subconscious pressures 
that produce what are called ''anxiety 
neuroses'' and other morbid causes of un- 
happiness. In such cases the success of the 
marriage will generally depend upon what is 
called the ''sublimation'' of the race in- 
stinct — as, for example, among men who sub- 
limate in their work, creatively, and among 
women who sublimate their maternal im- 
pulse in efforts of charity and social reform. 



CHAPTER III 

IN HEALTH 

A RABBIT hears the bark of a dog. At 
once, as science has discovered, the 
rabbit's heart speeds up and its blood 
pressure rises. Its breathing quickens in 
order to gain more oxygen. Sugar, which 
is a muscle food, is thrown into the blood. 
Digestion is stopped, and blood is shunted 
into the running muscles. All this is auto- 
matic and independent of intelligence. That 
is to say, it is instinctive. The rabbit 
bounds away toward the safety of his hole 
and reaches it with evident elation. He is 
happy in the satisfaction of an instinct. 

Scientific studies on the battlefield have 
proved that exactly the same physical 
changes take place in the body of a man. 
He is subject to the instinct of flight and the 
instinctive emotion of fear, just as the 
rabbit is. But, imlike the rabbit, the man 
has a conscious intelligence which conflicts 
with his instinct. The frightened rabbit 
does not have any feeling of self-reproach 

48 



IN HEALTH 

when it yields to its instinct of flight. The 
man has. Moreover, the man, having been 
taught to believe that fear is shameful, 
can blot the feeling of fear out of his con- 
scious mind. 

Is that the end of it? Apparently not. 
The new science of the subconscious mind 
has discovered that the fear is suppressed 
from consciousness into the imconscious 
— with amazing results. 

During the war with Germany we were 
all reading in the newspapers about soldiers 
with ** shell-shock** who had gone blind or 
deaf unaccoimtably on the battlefield, and 
who had as mysteriously recovered their 
sight or hearing when a submarine sank 
their hospital ship and plimged them in 
cold water. And we read about the phy- 
sicians who were curing such cases by 
hypnotism, or merely by suggestion, or by 
a rather heroical electric treatment. Doctor 
X had several of these "shell-shock** cases 
— cases of heart disease or of digestive 
trouble that had no discoverable physical 
cause. What are these cases? 

''When a man,'* he says, *'goes blind or 
deaf from shell-shock there is nothing 
wrong with his eyes or his ears. They are 
receiving and registering light waves or 
soimd waves and transmitting the messages 

49 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

to the brain. But the conscious mind does 
not receive these messages. In some way 
the subconscious mind has broken the con- 
nection. The physician who cures such 
a case by hypnotism merely reaches the 
subconscious mind and reassures it. He 
says to it: *The battle is over. You do 
not have to go back. You can see — or you 
can hear — without danger. You are safe.* 
The pltmge into cold water from the sinking 
ship restores the sight or hearing because 
the sinking of the ship confronts the sub- 
conscious mind with a new danger from 
which blindness or deafness cannot protect 
it. The same curative effect has been 
obtained by a shock of electricity in some 
French hospitals, although this latter method 
is so cruel that it has been tabooed. My 
cases of heart disease were merely examples 
of the rapid heart of instinctive fear: they 
had been mistaken for heart disease because 
the conscious mind of the patient had so 
explained themi to himself. My cases of 
digestive disorder were of the same origin; 
instinctive fear stops digestion, in order to 
deliver blood to the running muscles. My 
patients had repressed the feeling of fear 
from their conscious minds, but it had 
remained in their unconscious, instinctive 
minds. It had remained there as a mass 

50 



IN HEALTH 

of undrained, unconscious emotion — an un- 
recognized, subconscious wish — the wish to 
escape. And when some final shock weak- 
ened the repression the wish expressed 
itself in a bodily symptom. _ A man, in 
fact, goes blind or deaf from shell-shock 
because a compulsive and instinctive fear 
has wished him so." 

The curing of shell-shock is simple enough 
if the patient is safe from the danger of 
being returned to the trenches. Several 
thousand cases were cured by the signing 
of the armistice. But the problem is com- 
plicated by the fact that shell-shock is not 
a disease of cowards, but of brave men. It 
afflicts only the man who refuses to allow 
himself to be conscious of a feeling of fear. 
He could be saved from the disorder, 
according to Doctor X, if army doctors 
would go through the training camps and 
make some such speech as this: 

*'As soon as you face the dangers of the 
battlefield you will feel fear. Your body 
will register fear uncontrollably. This is 
instinctive. It cannot be prevented. It 
is fear, not cowardice. Do not attempt to 
suppress it. Say to yourself: 'My body 
is scared, but I am not. It is getting 
ready to run, but it is not going to nm 
back; it is going to nm forward. It is not 

51 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

going to retreat, but to charge.' If you 
attempt to suppress your instinctive feeling 
of fear, you are likely to end in a hospital 
with a bad case of shell-shock." 

In other words. Doctor X finds that if 
the instinctive emotion is not suppressed — 
if it is recognized, though not acted on — it 
will drain ofE harmlessly in the conscious 
mind. He adds: "Such a simple lesson in 
the psychology of the instinctive mind 
would prevent all the cases of pure shell- 
shock that I have seen, and it would go 
far to do the same for many of the com- 
plicated neuroses that are the result of 
physical injury added to shell-shock. More- 
over, along with euery instinctive emotion 
go definite physical changes similar to those 
that accompany instinctive fear. And these 
changes will appear as disease symptoms if 
the instinct has been blocked and the in- 
stinctive emotion suppressed into the un- 
conscious mind." 

Why? 

**Well, broadly speaking," Doctor X says 
— and here is the crux of his whole theory — 
"instinct is the one thing in the mind of 
man that is both unconscious and com- 
pulsive. It is the same in animals. The 
bird that has an instinct to fly south at a 
certain season cannot resist when that time 

52 



IN HEALTH 

comes; it has to go. A bird whose instinct 
it is to build its nest in a certain way cannot 
change the method; and it cannot leave the 
nest uncompleted. The action cannot be 
directed or controlled by the animal; the 
instinct is unconscious and it is compulsive. 
Civilized man represses his instincts. He 
tries to control and direct them. And 
commonly he succeeds, but more commonly 
he merely represses their direct expression 
and they escape into action in some dis- 
guised form.'* 

Now is this really true of the other 
instincts of man — instincts less powerful and 
compelling than the instinct of flight and 
its emotion of fear? Let us see. 

*'I have recently had a patient," says 
Doctor X, **who was referred to me by a 
nose and throat specialist to be diagnosed. 
He was suffering with what seemed to be 
a constant and uninterrupted hay fever. 
His tonsils had been removed and the septum 
of his nose had been straightened, but 
without effect. My examination showed 
that he was suffering with a chronic con- 
gestion of the blood vessels on the inside of 
his nose — a sort of persistent 'blushing.' 

"The blush of shame or anger was not 
originally confined to the face. An angry 
naked baby shows its resentment by turning 

S3 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

red over its whole body, and it is quite 
probable — though not proved — that this 
flushing occurs along the lining skin of the 
body also, so that an angry stomach is 
probably a blushing stomach. With the 
repression of emotion, the blushing of shame 
has been localized in the skin of the neck 
and face, and the nose has become a favored 
outlet for what we call the 'minimized' 
expression of anger — the snarling and snort- 
ing of animal rage in miniature. 

''My patient's snuffing, sneezing nose so 
suggested the minimized expression of a 
repressed anger that I shifted my examina- 
tion from his nose to his mind.'* 

He proved to be a very intelligent man, 
manager of a large industry, with several 
thousand skilled workmen engaged in highly 
technical processes tinder his direction. He 
had a very broad outlook on life and on the 
duty of the individual to his fellow men. It 
showed in his lively sympathy for the 
problems and well-being of the workmen 
tmder him. It showed also in his outspoken 
patriotism and in his genuine regret that 
his age barred him from active service in 
the war against Germany, which we had 
just entered. And it showed, finally, in his 
confession that he was worried and dis- 
tressed because the executive heads of his 

54 



IN HEALTH 

corporation were getting their employees 
exempted from military service on the plea 
that the men were engaged in an essential 
war industry. 

On further probing, this proved to be a 
very sore point with him. He knew that 
the government stood in great need of his 
skilled technicians. Many of the men wished 
to volimteer for special service. The wives 
of others were complaining that the neighbors 
were calling their husbands *' slackers.'' He 
himself believed that the executive heads 
of the company were wrong. Yet he felt in 
duty botmd to convince the men and their 
wives that the executive order was wise and 
just. He was, consequently, angry at his 
superiors, angry at himself, humiliated by 
his position, and full of exasperated resent- 
ment at the whole business. All of this he 
was loyally repressing. It was apparent 
only in his irritated nose. 

'*I explained to him what I thought was 
the matter,'' Doctor X continues. *'He 
replied simply that the theory opened a new 
field of thought to him, and he wished to 
consider it. With that, he left me. 

''When he returned he had solved his 
problem. He had resigned and applied for 
work with the government. An examination 
showed that his nose was already clearing 

55 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

up. I ordered him to take a rest, but 
before he left for his holiday his nose had 
cured. 

''Here we have an instinctive anger re- 
action replying automatically to the signal 
of interference in the course of moral self- 
assertion. If the whole process had occurred 
in the conscious mind, the flush of irritation 
wovdd have been apparent and recognizable. 
But the emotion had been repressed; the 
symptom had been split off from it, and all 
that appeared in consciousness was the 
chronic bodily irritation. It was as if a 
cat, having assured herself that it was 
beneath her pride to be angered by the 
presence of a dog, had thereafter succeeded 
in ignoring the dog to the point of being 
unaware of the animal, but had been annoyed 
by the rising of her hair and had spent her 
time — ^and the time of a physician — trying 
either to smooth down her hair or to get 
a medicine that should calm the erective 
nerves at the base of the hair follicles. 

"There was an interesting confirmation 
of my diagnosis in this fact: the patient's 
'hay fever' was relieved rather than aggra- 
vated by the alkali dust of his boyhood 
home in the West; and he was always day- 
dreaming of buying a ranch there and 
escaping to the freedom of the prairie from 

56 



IN HEALTH 

the confinement and subservience of his 
commercial work. It was part of his cure to 
encourage him to look forward to this 
Western haven of refuge as the goal of 
his career." 

That is to say, the patient was immediately 
relieved by reordering his life so as to allow 
his suppressed instinct of self-assertion to 
express itself, and a permanent cure was 
provided for by bringing his suppressed sub- 
conscious wish into his conscious mind and 
allowing it to drain off there. 

After this ego instinct — the Instinct of 
self-assertion — perhaps the most powerful of 
all human instincts is the sex instinct. 

"I have a patient who is suffering with a 
'humiliated skin,'" says Doctor X. *'She 
is imhappy with her husband who, she 
complains, offends against her self-respect. 
As a matter of fact she is unhappy because 
her ideal love image has been founded on 
her brother whom she idolized in girlhood, 
and no married relation is ideal to her. 
This revolt of the suppressed instinct of sex 
has been so thoroughly explored by the 
Freudian psychologists that I scarcely need 
refer to it. In my experience it is respon- 
sible for most of those diseases in women 
for which surgical operations are now so 
fashionable. Such operations rarely cure. 
5 57 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

They amputate the symptom, so to speak, 
but they do not reach the cause of the 
symptom. They are commonly as inef- 
fective as the operation on the septum of 
my friend's angry nose. 

'*It seems to me, however, that the 
Freudians err in seeking the origin of so 
many bodily and mental ills in the sexual 
instinct. True, that instinct is most re- 
pressed by our civilization and most potent 
in its resentment against repression, but 
it is also most frequently and successfully 
sublimated, converted into harmless energy, 
and socialized along channels that are for 
the general good of the herd. The sub- 
conscious mind itself — as the Freudian 
studies of dreams show — disguises the 
sexual impulse in symbols whose meaning 
is not easily recognized. I find that beneath 
these symbols is another layer of meaning 
in which the sexual content is displaced by 
other instinctive trends; and in my ex- 
perience it is often a great mistake to expose 
to the patient the sexuality of dreams and 
impulses which his subconscious mind has 
disguised from him. I find that the ex- 
posure has little value as a curative. It is 
still necessary to re-establish the patient's 
defective personality or to reorder his life 
so as to remove the conflict. And fre- 

58 



IN HEALTH 

quently, as I say, the exposure is valueless, 
because the psychic conflict is not really 
sexual.** 

He gives, as an example, the case of one 
of his patients, an ascetic and religious 
young man, who came to be treated for 
insomnia and nervous breakdown. His 
dreams showed strong sex repression, but 
they so disguised it that he could describe 
them without the slightest suspicion of their 
real meaning. They were nearly all dreams 
of his childhood — which indicated that he 
had not broken his home ties early enough 
in life. This proved to be true. He had 
been engaged to marry, but he had kept 
postponing his wedding, reluctant to begin 
life for himself, until a less dilatory lover 
ran off with his fianc6e. As a result of that 
disaster, he had fallen ill. The illness in- 
creased his dependence. It also convinced 
him that he would never be well enough 
to take on the responsibilities of marriage. 
He had since left home, but he had aban- 
doned all thoughts of love, and he was living 
the bachelor life of a hermit, completely 
ascetic and unsociable. 

He had not only developed insomnia. He 
had also developed an aversion to beds. 
He sat up half the night reading, and often 
slept in his chair. He always traveled in 

59 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

a day coach on the railroads, and the sight 
of a sleeping car filled him with irritation 
and dread. 

Doctor X says: **I was struck by the 
fact that he constantly wore blue — not 
only blue serge clothes, but blue silk socks, 
blue neckties, or a blue band on his straw 
hat. When it appeared that he carried also 
a blue leather card case and a pocketbook 
of the same color I suspected an imcon- 
scious 'compulsion.' 

"His explanation was that he had been 
told blue was his color, that it was becoming 
to him, that he always preferred it. 

"I was struck also by the repeated 
appearance in his dreams of a little cousin 
named Roger, of whom he had been very 
fond in his boyhood days. Roger had died 
at the age of foiir. What was the signifi- 
cance of the subconscious image of this 
infant in his mind?" 

Both puzzles were solved by a dream 

which he brought to be analyzed. ''I 

dreamed I was at home,'' he said, ''on the 

farm where I was bom, and I was looking 

in the chicken house for eggs, and there was 

with me a small child who seemed to be 

baby Roger. I foimd an eggy but I dropped 

it and it broke. There was a hen sitting 

on some eggs, and Roger crawled back in a 

60 



IN HEALTH 

comer and said he had found lots of eggs. 
I looked in the nest and it was full of eggs 
that were marked with a blue pencil. I 
told the baby that he mustn't touch the 
eggs and that we must get away so that the 
hen would come back and hatch them all 
into chickens." 

'*In order to discover what this dream 
meant," Doctor X continues, '*I began to 
ask him to 'associate, ' as we say, the objects 
in his dream with the ideas which they 
suggested — that is to say, to tell me what 
thoughts came to him when I said *egg' or 
' chicken house ' or * blue marks,' and so forth." 

He at once recalled that as a child he 
had been in the habit of going with his 
mother to the chicken house to see her feed 
the chickens and gather the eggs. He 
recalled also that she marked with a blue 
pencil the eggs that were to be left to hatch 
and gathered only the unmarked ones. 
From this he had concluded it was the 
blue mark on the egg that made it fertile 
and produced a chicken. Blue, therefore, 
was a sign of fertility. 

It also appeared that the egg which he 
had dropped in his dream represented his 
unhappy love affair, which had been frus- 
trated. And the baby Roger represented 
his own child that had never been bom. 

6i 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

It seemed too fantastic to suppose that 
this young man was wearing blue because 
of an imconscious and frustrated wish to 
have children, but further dreams repeated 
the symbol in so many forms that it was 
unmistakable. ''Moreover," says Doctor 
X, "when I assured him that his fear of 
insomnia was not fear of a sleepless night, 
but fear of a loveless life, his insomnia began 
to improve. His phobia for sleeping cars 
and beds disappeared. Sleep rapidly re- 
sumed its normal aspects, but he suffered 
from the pain of his real disappointment, 
his failure to realize a love object. 

"Instead of following the Freudian prac- 
tice of interpreting the patient's dreams to 
him, I undertook to sublimate his repressed 
instincts. I pretended to accept his belief 
that his ill health forbade him to marry, 
but I pointed out that he could socialize his 
thwarted affection by devoting himself to 
acts of kindness and works of charity or 
reform, and achieve a measure of happiness 
by making others happy. As a result of 
that advice, he joined in some social and 
charitable church and settlement work. He 
improved so much in health that he soon 
ceased to consult me. The last time I heard 
from him he was deep in a 'platonic friend- 
ship' for a young woman at the settlement 

62 



IN HEALTH 

house. I venttire to prophesy that the first 
time he sees her in blue he will discover 
that he is in love with her.*' 

I might go on reporting these cases 
endlessly. Doctor X has hundreds of them 
— cases of chronic ill health that came to 
him for diagnosis because the physicians 
who had been treating them had failed to 
cure them — cases of obscure nervous dis- 
orders that had no recognizable physical 
origin — cases of functional disturbance that 
looked as if they might be due to some 
trouble with the internal glands. And again 
and again he found that the illness was due 
to the blocking of an instinct or the re- 
pression of an instinctive emotion. And 
again and again he cured by first releasing 
the emotion into the conscious mind and 
then reordering the life of the patient so as 
to relieve the blocked instinct. 

Instinctive fear is a common cause of 
illness in his practice, because it affects the 
heart and the thyroid gland. But this fear 
is not always the instinctive fear of physical 
danger, as in the case of the soldier. It 
may be the fear of moral danger; "for man,'' 
as he points out, "reacts to a menace against 
his moral welfare exactly as the animal 
reacts to a menace against its bodily safety; 
and the daily battering of the instinct of 

63 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

fear — in the shape of worry, anxiety, or 
moral distress — against the heart and glands 
of the patient, will produce definite structural 
changes and a great degree of ill health.'* 

He finds perhaps the most fruitful of all 
the causes of illness among his patients to 
be the blocking or suppression of the in- 
stinct of self-assertion, expressing itself in 
anger, resentment, jealousy, or a permanent 
conviction of failure and inferiority. Let me 
give a case of this sort which is interesting 
because of the light it throws on the psy- 
chology of revolt. 

"I have a patient,'* he says, *'a very 
gentle and charming man, sympathetic, 
artistic, a radical if not a Socialist in politics, 
especially interested in the betterment of 
working conditions, most violent in his op- 
position to child labor, considerate of the 
feelings of others, but easily irritated, and 
continually under medical treatment for all 
sorts of physical ills. He has a minor 
position under the municipal government. 
He complains, privately, with great bitter- 
ness, of injustices that are put upon him by 
his chief, and shows strong emotion in his 
resentment. At other moments he seems 
truly fond of this man, and blames the 
friction on the imperfections of municipal 
government. His main difficulty is his lack 

64 



IN HEALTH 

of interest in his work, and, consequently, of 
* going power.' He has always to force 
himself to begin his routine tasks by an 
effort of will; he tires easily; and he has to 
whip himself up again and again. This he 
attributes to his physical condition. Now, 
let us look at his youth.*' 

He was bom in a small country town, of 
poor parents. He was set to work at an 
early age, and at twelve he was slaving on 
a farm from five o'clock in the morning till 
seven o'clock at night. The farm was four 
miles from his home, and he had to walk 
that distance, night and morning. 

One Fourth of July he wanted a holiday, 
to go to a baseball game. His father, a 
very stem and religious man, ordered him 
off to his work. He started out, but a 
shower overtook him on the way, and he 
accepted it as an excuse for turning back, 
since it was haying time and no work could 
be done till the grass dried again. He 
played truant around town till midday. 
When he returned home for dinner his en- 
raged father went after him with a stick. 
For the first time in his life he resisted and 
struck back. He was severely beaten, lec- 
tured into a state of horror at himself for 
having struck his father, and sent to the 
farm to apologize for his truancy. 

65 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

The whole incident made a profound im- 
pression on him. He had a great admiration 
for his father, who played the organ in 
the chtirch choir, composed music, practiced 
on the 'cello at home, and lifted the boy 
to ecstatic heights of emotion in the evening 
when he lay in bed listening. 

''That little drama of the Fourth of 

July,'' says Doctor X, ''proved to be the 

key to my patient's whole character. I 

foimd that, in his dreams, authority was 

always symbolized by the razor-backed 

plow-horse which he used to follow back and 

forth through the rows of com. I found 

that in his daily life, whenever the generous 

impulses of affection were brought into play, 

they were at once mysteriously embittered 

at the least sign of injustice. The drama 

of his life was the drama of his childhood 

repeated with various changes in the cast, 

but no change in the characters. The city 

government had taken over the father's 

role, and the bureau chief was substituting 

for the farmer. Revolt against his father's 

tyranny had become a revolt against social 

injustice — ^as it becomes in many reformers. 

Fear of the father's punishment had become 

a morbid fear of losing his job. The excuse 

for an escape from work afforded by the 

storm in his boyhood had become the excuse 

66 



IN HEALTH / 

of ill health. His 111 health, however, was 
exactly the sort that would follow if one 
subjected one's body to the shattering in- 
fluence of continual anger. It might be 
accurately described as ' structuralized re- 
sentment.* His own explanation was that 
overwork had broken down a body always 
undeveloped because of the effects of child 
labor." 

Here we have health ruined by an early 
blocking of instinctive trends and by the 
conflict of emotions resulting from the con- 
stant repetition of the drama of childhood. 
The patient has been helped by making him 
aware of the conflict, by bringing it into his 
conscious mind. But it is difficult to cure 
him, because it is impossible to change his 
life so as to avoid the reduplication of the 
** symbols** of the childhood drama. 

And that is one of the strange things about 
the instinctive mind. Being a dream mind 
that thinks only in pictures — in ''symbols*' 
— all its instinctive emotions can be started 
up by the reappearance of one of these 
symbols away from its context. 

For instance: ''A woman,** says Doctor 
X, **came to me suffering from insomnia 
and depression. No reason for her con- 
dition was apparent until she admitted a 
pecvJiar circumstance: she could not sleep 

67 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

if there was a certain chair in the room. 
The sight of the chair always filled her with 
dread. She had refused to * humor this 
nonsense* in herself by getting rid of the 
chair, and had struggled against the feeling. 
The chair was evidently a symbol. Of what? 

''The patient was a woman of culture 
who felt very keenly the loneliness of ap- 
proaching old age. She had bulwarked 
herself against thoughts of age and death 
by surroimding herself with youthful friends 
and companions. One of these friends, of 
whom she was most fond, had been accus- 
tomed to sit in the now dreaded chair. Two 
days after such a visit the friend had 
suddenly died of pneumonia. Death had 
been leaning over that chair. But my 
patient would not allow the fear of death to 
have a place in her mind. Consequently 
the feeling appeared only as an imexplain- 
able dread of the chair, an insomnia con- 
nected with the sight of the chair, and a 
mysterious illness and depression. 

"Another patient had a violent hatred of 
red, of the odor of peppermint, of sticks of 
candy, and of dark women, particularly if 
they wore anything red. Any of these 
symbols was sufficient to affect her with an 
emotion of dread and repulsion, and the 
feeling of fear had been active in warping 

68 



IN HEALTH 

her life, mining her health, and thwarting 
her happiness. All these symbols were easily 
traced back to a day in her early childhood 
when a gypsy woman had tried to abduct 
her by first luring her away from her home 
with a stick of peppermint candy, striped in 
red and white. 

** Still another patient, a married woman, 
devoted to her husband, became morbidly 
afraid that she was losing her mind. For 
no apparent reason, at unaccountable mo- 
ments, she would develop the most violent 
nervous agitation and rush out of the house, 
quite distraught, to seek refuge with her 
neighbors and confide her fears to them. 
These attacks began in a wave of dread so 
unreasonable that it seemed to her as if her 
mind were giving way. As soon as I took 
her back to the actual moment of each 
seiztue, it became apparent that several of 
them had begun with the ringing of a 
telephone bell. One had arisen upon sight 
of a coat of a peculiar color. Still another 
was connected with the right-hand cushion 
of an automobile. 

''The explanation was so simple that the 
only mystery was her imconsciousness of it. 
I found that one night, about six o'clock, 
her telephone bell had rung while her hus- 
band was out automobiling, and a strange 

69 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

voice had abruptly communicated a bit of 
slanderous gossip about him and the woman 
who was his companion in the car. The 
coat was like the one worn by his companion, 
who sat at the right-hand side of the car. 

''The wife had proudly refused to men- 
tion the matter to her husband. She had 
suppressed her instinctive jealousy deter- 
minedly. By so doing she had afflicted her- 
self with a 'floating anxiety' that made her 
think she was going crazy. She was cured 
by being taught to say to herself, 'I am 
afraid of losing my husband, ' whenever she 
found herself thinking, ' I am afraid of losing 
my mind.* With her husband's assistance 
her natural jealousy was also removed, and 
the whole phobia disappeared." 

Now, we do not know how the bodily 
symptoms of a psychic conflict can be cured 
by simply bringing the conflict into the 
conscious mind and relieving the repression. 
Apparently the emotion drains itself off 
harmlessly in consciousness; whereas, if it 
is suppressed into the unconscious mind, it 
either leaks disastrously into the vegetative 
nervous system or gets into the conscious 
mind as an unexplained emotion, such as an 
anxiety, or transforms its energy into an 
impulse to compulsive thoughts and actions. 
We shall have to consider, in subsequent 
70 



IN HEALTH 

chapters, the reappearance of these repres- 
sions in the form of uncontrollable impulses. 
And the manner in which they produce un- 
happiness and mental strain will also be 
discussed hereafter. For the moment, we 
are concerned only with their effect on 
health. It is a sufficiently inexhaustible 
subject. A whole library of monographs 
would not do it justice. A repressed in- 
stinctive emotion may transform itself into 
the symptoms of almost any physical dis- 
order that vidll help the patient to escape 
from his mental distress — as the shell-shock 
victim goes blmd because of his unconscious 
wish to escape from the battlefield. Deaf- 
ness, blindness, paralysis, epilepsy, and va- 
rious sorts of insanity may be so produced. 
Where the emotion is less powerful, it may 
be repressed into the switchboard of the 
tinconscious bodily processes which phy- 
sicians call ''the vegetative nervous system *' ; 
and there it may cause almost any sort of 
obscure fimctional disturbance, not only in 
the nervous system itself, but in the digestive 
processes and all the organs of digestion, 
in the internal glands and their secretions, 
in the circulatory system and the blood, 
and most easily of all apparently in the skin. 
I have watched the cure of one of Doctor 
X's patients who had been for years under 

71 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

treatment by specialists, and they had 
pursued the symptoms of disorders of the 
eye, ear, throat, and nose from organ to 
organ diligently, operating on the tonsils, 
straightening the septtim of the nose, treat- 
ing the ears, removing infected teeth, and 
so forth endlessly, until Doctor X — being 
consulted as a goiter expert — found that the 
patient's medical history had begim with a 
pathological blushing, and he cured the 
whole trouble by removing the repression 
from which all thr symptoms arose. Sim- 
ilarly, I have followed the case of another 
patient who had spent years under treat- 
ment, first for indigestion, the for diseases 
of the pelvic region, and finally for neu- 
rasthenia complicated by a*' floating kidney,'* 
before he came to Doctor X for diagnosis, 
and was cured in a few months by being 
relieved of the imconscious repressions from 
v/liich he was reaily suffering. 

It would be absurd for me to attempt to 
give the medical details of such cases here, 
or to attempt to instruct the general reader 
in the method by which they may be diag- 
nosed and treated. The repression is often 
complex and involved — repression added to 
repression — and the cure is correspondingly 
long and difficult. It is enough for our 
purposes to consider, not how these dis- 

72 



IN HEALTH 

orders may be cured, but how they may be 
prevented. And the method of prevention 
is this: 

If you wish to keep well, do not try to 
reprr^c vonr emotions, yonr instirciive feel- 
ings, ^^nv^ compulsive thou^^hts. Do not 
act on them, necessarily; but alv/avs allow 
them to drpir» themselver? off in your con- 
scious mmd. *' However mean and cowardly 
and impious and undutiful and low they 
may be," Doctor X advises, ''accent them 
into the most airy chamber of your thought 
and examine thetTi there unabashed. If you 
drive them down into yptir secret cellar, they 
may end tA^ tearing d jwn the whole house. 
If you welcome them into your parlor, you 
may be surprised to see how quickly thev will 
wash 'theft: faces and change their clothes and 
make themselves respectable/* 

At lirst sight, this seems a simple pre- 
scription. It is, in fact, startling and revo- 
lutionary. Half the sins of the church 
catalogue are sins of thought. Our religious 
education has largely directed itself to the 
government of our minds. To think murder 
is to do mturder. Hatred, envy, jealousy, 
concupiscence, anger, pride, and so forth, are 
all only one degree less sinful than the 
actions which they might inspire. 

*'It is not my business to argue that such 
6 75 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

teaching is bad as ethics or religion/* says 
Doctor X. ''I wish only to point out that 
it fails of its purpose. The boy who sup- 
presses his instinctive hatred of an unjust 
father as a sin is much more likely to behave 
unconsciously as if he hated his father than 
if he allowed the feeling to drain off in his 
conscious mind. He is also more likely to 
destroy his health, his happiness, and his 
whole efficiency as a member of society — 
for the suporessed hatred is almost sure to 
escape nim either as a physical disturbance 
such as a hate neu^osio or as a transferred 
hate againw^t authority in school, m govern- 
ment, or in religion. The liian who sup- 
presses his instinctive anger — which is the 
wish to kill — is much more likely to be over- 
taken by the ungovernable impulse to kill, 
and to act on it with some form of violence, 
than the man who lets the wish into his 
conscious mind, and faces it and says to it, 
'You may have your own way in my 
thoughts, but you cannot get into my 
actions.* And havi^^ ^st ^h'^se thou'rhts be 
recognized in vour mind, you are then more 
able to imd a way to readjust your life so 
as to be rid of them.'* 

Whether Doctor X wishes to argue it or 
not, his prescription means that our moral 
authorities have been making the same 

74 



IN HEALTH 

mistake about our other instinctive and 
''sinful" impulses as the military authorities 
have been making about our instinctive 
fear. By teaching us that we must suppress 
such thoughts from our minds with shame 
and self-reproach, they have betrayed us all 
into various forms of moral shell-shock that 
have defeated the ends of morality. For, 
just as the subconscious wish to escape from 
the battlefield may attain its purpose by 
blinding its victim, our other suppressed 
instinctive wishes succeed in evading our 
moral censors by adopting similar disguises. 
And whether Doctor X wishes to argue 
it or not, this new light on our moral prob- 
lems is going to force as great a change in 
our ethical and religious teaching as the 
theory of the subconscious mind is already 
making in the practice of medicine. It is 
the beginning of a new quarrel between 
science and religion beside which the con- 
troversies over the Darwinian theory will 
seem mild enough. And it is the beginning 
of a hope that after centuries of failure to 
control the instinctive animal in man — his 
passions and his cruelties — ethics and phi- 
losophy have at last been given a clue to 
problems that have been the despair of 
ethics and philosophy since man began to 
think about himself. 

75 



CHAPTER IV 

IN CHILDHOOD 

HERE we are, then, with three great facts 
about ourselves: our subconscious mind 
is the animal mind through which our in- 
stincts work ; our instincts are as compulsive 
with us as with the animals, and move us by 
means of instinctive emotions that register 
in our conscious minds as dimib, imreasoning 
wishes; and if v/e repress these emotions from 
our minds, instead of letting them drain off 
in consciousness, they are likely to reappear 
as bodil}^ symptoms of disease and wreck 
our health. Furtheimore, these instinctive 
emotions in mian, as in the animals, have 
starting signals, which we call ''symbols'* — 
such as the ''love image,'' which is the 
starting signal for instinctive affection — and 
we are liable to be as mechanically moved 
by these symbols as the rabbit is automati- 
cally set in motion by the bark of a dog. 

This, however, is not the whole of the 
extraordinary business. The subconscious 
mind is the mind with which we are bom. 

76 



IN CHILDHOOD 

It IS the mind that controls us before we 
develop a conscious intelligence, a thinking 
mind, at all. It has a record of infantile 
experiences and conclusions that persist in 
all of us, though we are imaware of them. 
And these have a powerful, though un- 
conscious, influence on us in our later years. 

Let us see what some of these influences 
are. 

As Doctor X points out, before a child 
is bom its physical machine is complete, 
except that oxygen is supplied from the 
maternal body and not through the child's 
lungs. It is not breathing. Its heart is 
beating and its other organs fimctioning 
under the direction of what physicians call 
the *' vegetative nen^ous system*' — that is 
to say, witnout the aid of consciousness. 
The heart has been beating for months, so 
that it has acquired a protective habit of 
action which makes it more independent of 
conscious thought than other organs are. 
Impressions are being registered on the 
brain, but they are impressions of perfect 
contentment. The whole period is one that 
he calls "the period of omnipotent indolence." 

"Our insane asylums,'' he says, "are full 
of minds that have reverted to this state. 
It is the inertia and contentment which is 
imitated by the warm bath, the nest or 

77 



THE SECRET. SPRINGS 

burrow, or the mother's arms. It is the 
inertia which the utterly broken man ex- 
periences. We see it very clearly in the 
'cavern dreams' of a certain class of psy- 
chotics. It is the goal of escape for many 
who commit suicide.'' 

Immediately upon birth, this condition of 
indolent contentment imdergoes a terrifying 
change. The body is assailed by sensations 
of roughness and cold and shocking dis- 
comfort. It is also assailed by the danger 
of suffocation, because the maternal supply 
of oxygen has been cut off and the lungs are 
not yet working. The child in its agony 
utters a cry. That cry saves its life. The 
lungs receive their oxygen. The danger of 
suffocation is averted. And the symbol of 
what Doctor X calls "the magic cry" is 
established in the child's subconscious mind. 

*'It is probable," he says, "that the agony 
of birth also establishes in our subconscious 
mind the fear of death by suffocation as the 
great symbol of danger. In most people the 
first expression of panic under physical or 
psychic stress is the cry, 'I can't get my 
breath!' Nervous patients — neurotics — 
always tell you that in crowds or on street 
cars they 'feel suffocated.' The convulsive 
'chest heaves' of the moving-picture hero- 
ines in distress simulate a normal expression 

78 



IN CHILDHOOD 

of the same nature. And the escape from 
suffocation — the act of breathing — comes to 
be a symbol, too. Throughout Hfe, there- 
after, a deep breath becomes the expression 
of every sort of escape, of every feeling of 
freedom or of power. It signalizes the 
escape from the oppression of an enemy's 
presence as well as the removal of a mental 
worry. A sigh expresses the wish for free 
dom from a weight of care. The proud 
man puffs out his chest.*' 

The infant, with its lungs supplied, feels 
its next discomfort in a hungry contraction 
of the stomach which obtrudes upon the 
quiet contentment of breathing. The magic 
cry is again resorted to, and food is supplied 
to sucking movements. Sucking is thereby 
demonstrated to be a device that dispels 
discomfort, and the infant uses it, thereafter, 
to allay discomfort of any kind. The 
''pacifier," the ''comforter,*' has power not 
only over hunger, but over cold, lonesome- 
ness, and pain. It continues to have that 
power in the subconscious mind throughout 
life. At first, the unconscious impulse takes 
the form of thiunb-sucking. The older 
child, when it is embarrassed, puts its finger 
in its mouth. The laborious young penman 
sucks his tongue. Adults suck the insides 
of their cheeks or bite a penholder when 

79 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

they are puzzled. The cigar, the quid of 
chewing tobacco, the cigarette, the chewing 
gum, or the caramel are adiilt aids to a con- 
dition of sucking satisfaction. Eating has a 
power of restoring self-confidence that ex- 
ceeds mere food values. 

When the infant's skin reports discomfort 
it 'Cries again, and the cry brings themother 
to relieve it. Skin warmth and smoothness 
become a fixed "pleasure value" to the 
subconscious mind. To sit by a warm fire 
in a soft smoking jacket, sucking a pipe or 
a cigar, is the acme of many a tired man's 
wishes. ''It is a state,** Doctor X remarks, 
*'that differs in no material way from the 
comfort of the third day of life, and it re- 
stores confidence because it repeats and 
reproduces a 'stage set* — so to speak — that 
is of proven value to the subconscious mind. 
I find that many patients suffering with 
subconscious fears must have the silkiest 
clothes and warmest contacts in order to 
feel well. I find that the Titrkis^ ^^^h, the 
massage, and many rather faddish treat- 
ments of nervous diseases owe their value 
to the feeling of sectirity which arises from 
an imconscious connection with the 'security 
values* of early childhood. Any stroking 
of the skin, for instance, appears to have 
an unconscious connection with the pres- 

80 



IN CHILDHOOD 

ence of the first object of recognition, the 
mother/' 

The cradled child, by virtue of his magic 
cry, lives in a sort of semiomnipotence. He 
is a perfect egoist. He is completely self- 
centered, rejoicing in "organ pleasures** 
wholly. He is happy in the satisfaction of 
his physical needs. His first appreciations 
of pleasure and power are shown in the 
performance of his bodily fimctions. His 
first convictions of well-being apparently 
arise from the good ''feeling tones'* that are 
reported to his imconscious mind from all 
his vital organs. ''And I find in my prac- 
tice,** says Doctor X, "that these values 
persist as things of basic importance to 
happiness in later life. All the organs of the 
body seem constantly to be sending mes- 
sages to the subconscious mind, reporting 
their condition. And the sum of their 
reports makes what we call the 'feeling* of 
well-being or its opposite. If the total of 
these 'feeling tones* is adverse, we are 
gloomy, melancholy, or generally 'feeling 
bad.* If the whole stream of feeling tones 
is good, we are cheerful, optimistic, happy. 
I find that much adult happiness has this 
subconscious basis. That is particularly 
true of cheerfulness in the face of adversity.** 

He is a wise man, therefore, who tries to 
8i 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

re-establish these good-feeling tones by re- 
joicing in his body like a child. He will 
make the beginning of a happy and self- 
confident day by preparing for himself a 
comfortable body and taking pleasure in it. 
A little exercise, the freedom of a leisurely 
bath, and the refreshment of skin friction 
will help to establish an unconscious sense 
of well-being. So will the completion of 
digestive process, which gives to the child 
feelings of satisfaction and power that are 
often lost to the adult because of false 
education. Breathing is a pleastire ennobled 
by its first importance as an escape from 
death; and by breathing deeply and well 
you can acquire a sense of innate self- 
confidence that defies unhappiness. Eating, 
as a child eats, with absorbed attention, is 
another device to restore subconscious well- 
being. And walking, which brings the child 
its first taste of real ability, has an amazing 
value to the instinctive mind if you walk 
erectly, breathing deep, in a correct posture, 
with the abdomen in and the chest out. 

Throughout the day, a cramped position, 
a glaring light, annoying sounds, a chilly 
skin, aching feet, or gastric irritation may 
turn discomfort into unhappiness and con- 
vert initiative into inertia. "The child," 
says Doctor X, ''demands with loud wails 

82 



IN CHILDHOOD 

the removal of any cause of discontent. 
Consider the infant and learn wisdom. We 
rather despise the man who coddles hii 
body, but if coddling increases energy, what 
then? Consider that domesticated dynamo, 
the cat. No animal values its comfort more. 
Yet no animal has a more tireless energy 
when energy is called for.** 

To return to the child — his stage of 
cradled egoism and organ pleasures ends with 
the recognition of his weakness which comes 
when he begins to try to walk. He learns 
that his self is insiifficient. He seeks a 
higher power, and finds it in his mother. 
To such mind as he has at the time, her 
power is supernatural. The foundation of 
religion is laid. And, like all primitive 
minds, he learns to invoke that supernatural 
power by what Doctor X calls ' ' incantations. * * 

That is to say, the child discovers devices 
by means of which he attracts the mother's 
attention, and obtains assistance, approval, 
protection, and the general satisfaction of 
his ego. These devices progress along the 
line of ''showing off.*' He learns many en- 
dearing ways of winning his mother's 
caresses, and her approval lays the founda- 
tions of conscience. At the same time he 
obtains power through self-assertion, and he 
is thereby compensated for the loss of his 

83 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

indolent ''organ pleasures" and for the im- 
pairment of the original self-sufficiency of 
his cradled egoism. 

"He is now/' says Doctor X, **at a very 
dangerous point in his growth." His mind 
is almost wholly an imconscious mind, the 
mind of animal instincts, the primitive mind 
of early savagery that has to be civilized 
and socialized. The process may easily be 
disastrous. Why? 

Let me first give some instances from 
Doctor X's cases. 

Among them is a little girl named Amy, 
who had developed such a rapid heartbeat 
that her physician concluded she must be 
suffering from thyroid trouble and sent her 
to Doctor X for diagnosis. She was very 
nervous. She had incipient symptoms of 
St. Vitus's dance. Since any exaggerated 
activity of the thyroid gland gives an 
accelerated pulse and similar fimctional 
disturbances, it was natiu'ally supposed that 
her thyroid was affected. 

Her mother came with her. She was a 
well-to-do widow, living in apartments, and 
Amy was her only child. She was in a 
pitiful state of nervous anxiety herself. She 
was, in fact, almost as nervous as her 
daughter. 

''Examination showed," the doctor says, 
84 



IN CHILDHOOD 

**that Amy had no thyroid trouble — that she 
had, in fact, no physical defect sufficient to 
account for her condition. She was pale 
and peaked-looking, subject to bronchitis, 
wearing clothing that was much too heavy for 
the season, imdemourished and oversensitive, 
but basically sound. I found only a mild 
infection of the tonsils. When I advised 
that these should be removed the mother 
cried out against it. She could not have 
her child operated on. Amy might die. 
She could not face that danger to her 
daughter. She began to weep, and so did 
Amy.^' 

"Very well,'* the doctor said, '* perhaps it 
will not be necessary. Let us see.'* And 
he began to explore for the secret spring. 

It was, he found, ''as plain as the nose on 
little Amy's face." She had been subject 
to "night terrors" from infancy. She 
would wake up screaming, piirsued by night- 
mares, and unable for some moments to 
recognize her mother when her mother tried 
to calm her. There was fear, therefore, in 
the child's subconscious mind — in her dream 
mind. What was that fear? 

Her mother would luo let her play with 
other children for fear she might be hurt. 
Her mother would not let her go to school 
alone for fear she might be nm over crossing 

85 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

the street. She walked with Amy to school, 
and called for her when school was dismissed, 
so as to walk home with her. She never let 
Amy out of her sight if she could help it 
for fear that something might happen. She 
worried continually about Amy*s health, 
kept her in an overheated apartment all 
winter and overdressed her to go outdoors. 
In fact, she was in a constant state of 
fluttering panic about the child. 

"Now," the doctor explains, '*when an 
infant starts out in life its one place of 
security is its mother's arms. On the ap- 
proach of a stranger, or after the disappoint- 
ment of a fall, or when it has been defeated 
by another child, it will fly to its mother. 
The mother's arms are really a haven of 
refuge where it may replenish its strength — 
like Antaeus in the fable, who was renewed 
by contact with Mother Earth. All the 
child's infantile defeats are repaired by 
maternal affection. It is encouraged to try 
again, fortified against fear, given new con- 
fidence and assisted toward its independence 
— which it early begins to develop as the 
result of its instinct of self-assertion." 

It was evident that when little Amy in 
childish terror had sought her mother's 
protection she had found there only a fear 
like her own, and this fear had registered 

86 



IN CHILDHOOD 

so early in her life that it was now c^eep in 
her subcons^i.ms iniad. It came out at 
night in her dreams. All the accumulated 
infantile terrors of a baby facing the ac- 
cidents and imcertainties of its first step? 
in the world were waiting in nightmares for 
Amy. That much was plain. 

It was also discoverable from Amy herself 
that her contact with the other children in 
school had taught her the necessity of 
suppressing her fears as ^'babyish/' and she 
had evidently been trying to suppress them. 
But she coi/ ' ' iiu t repress the physical 
changes that go with fear, and ic was these 
physical effects that were being mistaken 
for the symptoms of thyroid disturbance. 

The cure was difficult, because it was first 
necessary to cure the mother — which was a 
different matter. However, on making it 
plain to her that her child was being literally 
frightened to death, it became possible for 
Doctor X to use her maternal love against 
what was, in her, really a fear of death, 
disguised as various ungovernable anxieties. 
These, by the way, included not only her 
fear for her daughter's life and safety, but 
a dread of financial disaster, showing itself 
as miserliness. ''And miserliness," Doctor 
X remarks, ''is one of the commonest maski 
that the fear of death assumes." 

87 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

"Amy," he says, ''was assisted toward 
health by the development of that instinct 
of love for the opposite sex which comes with 
adolescence. Such is nature's way of com- 
pleting the detachment of the child from 
the parent. If Amy finds a husband who 
will give her the sense of security which her 
mother failed to give her, she may grow 
to be a fairly normal and happy woman. 
The chances, of course, are against her. 
Her mother has done her what may easily 
prove to be an injury that cannot be 
repaired.** 

Here is another case, involving not the 
instinct of fear, but of affection: 

There came to Doctor X recently an 
Irish boy of nineteen or twenty who was 
having trouble with his eyes. He was a 
clerk working on accounts in a business 
office. His eyes were ''all to the bad,** as 
he said. Whenever he tried to work on his 
books black specks appeared arotmd the 
figures; and if he persisted in trying to 
work, the specks accimiulated until they 
blotted the figures out. He was frightened. 
He was afraid of losing his sight. He had 
gone to an oculist; and the oculist, having 
failed to find any defect in his eyes, had 
sent him to Doctor X. 

"I found him,** he says, "a fairly healthy 



IN CHILDHOOD 

young specimen of humanity, handsome, 
rather soft, with an appealing and intim- 
idated look in his eyes which I supposed 
came from his fear for his sight. A physical 
examination discovered nothing to account 
for his condition. I began to go into his 
history with him to find whether some 
repre^«?ion was breaking through in his eyes." 

Doctor X supposed that the repressed in- 
stinct was probably the sexual instinct 
natural at the boy*s age. Not so. He was 
not in love with any girl.^'^ He had no girl 
friends. He did not go around with yoimg 
people much. He gave most of his spare 
time to his mother. She was a widow with 
a small income. They lived together, with- 
out a servant, in a little flat, and they were 
quite comfortable and happy. He was not 
planning any career. He had no definite 
ambition. At fifteen he had thought se- 
riously of studying for the priesthood, but 
he had given up the idea because it would 
separate him from his mother. Being a 
devout Roman Catholic, he was now making 
amends by going to church twice every 
Sunday. She accompanied him. 

The doctor said: ''It's too bad she's 
growing old. What will you do when she 
dies?" 

He had touched the spring. ''If I had 

7 89 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

poked my finger into an unbearable sore 
spot," he says, *'I could not have brought a 
more convulsive expression of pain to his 
face. His eyes filled with tears. He cotild 
not speak." 

^'Was she ill?" 

"No. She was not very strong, but he did 
not let her work much." 

* 'Wasn't she lonely when he was away at 
work?" 

"Yes, but he always hurried home at noon 
to see how she was, and he had had a tele- 
phone installed in the flat so that he might 
call her up whenever he felt anxious about 
her. 

"The thought of her death, of course, was 
terrible. He remembered that at fifteen he 
had decided he would like to die if she died. 
Now that he was unable to work, he stayed 
at home with her, helped her to keep the 
flat in order, went shopping with her, and 
either played cards with her in the evening 
or sat smoking while she read the newspaper 
to him." 

"Did the black specks interfere with his 
card playing?" 

"No. They were only really bad when he 
worked with figures at the office. She did 
not let him use his eyes much at home." 

"In short," the doctor says, "it was 
90 



IN CHILDHOOD 

evident that the black specks in his eyes were 
the physical mechanism by which he was 
fulfilling his subconscious wish to escape 
from his work and stay home with his mother. 
I explained to the boy what was the matter 
with him. I advised him to yield to his 
instinctive wish for the love and protection 
of his mother's care and to remain at home 
for the present. I also persuaded him to 
lean on me. By that last item of advice 
I obtained what we call a *tmnsference.' 
His father was dead. I was accepted by 
him, unconsciously, in the place of that 
'father image' which is often so strong an 
influence in life even when no father is 
remembered. I began to share with his 
mother in his childish need for a place of 
security and refuge from the world. 

''The specks in his eyes disappeared at 
once, but the remainder of his cure is going 
to be no easy matter. At his best, he will 
never be able to play an independent part 
in life. If he marries, it will probably be 
a woman older than he, to whom he will 
transfer his 'mother image', but this will 
hardly occur till after his mother's death. 
He will always be a shrinking, sensitive, 
dependent person, content with a humble 
but seciure position on a small salary, in- 
capable of initiative, honest, devoutly re- 

91 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

ligious, below the average in energy, para- 
sitic, and of little use to the world/' 

Now let us take a third case that is both 
more complicated and more illuminating. 

A boy named Tommy Arnold (let us say) 
was brought to Doctor X about a year ago, 
suffering with two 'Hies" — one a continual 
nervous sniffing, and the other a rolling 
aversion of the eyes. He had a fear of 
automobiles that amounted to a phobia; the 
sight of one approaching sent him into a 
panic, and it was quite impossible for him 
to cross a street if there were any autos in 
sight. He had completely broken down in 
his lessons at school. His teachers had 
pronounced him vinteachable. They were 
convinced — and his parents were afraid — 
that he was mentally defective. He had 
been sent to Doctor X, as a '* nerve spe- 
cialist,*' to discover what obscvire nervous 
disorder was ruining him; and the physician 
who sent him suggested that there was 
probably a disturbance of his internal glands. 

''There he sat," Doctor X recalls it, "in 
my big leather armchair, with his feet stick- 
ing out in front of him, scowling and sniffing 
and rolling his eyes — a bullet-headed small 
boy of seven, with a sensitive, intelligent 
face — a little frightened, a little sulky, listen- 
ing to his worried mother's report upon 

92 



IN CHILDHOOD 

him as if he were in his father's study 
hearing the tale of his latest wrongdoing 
and expecting consequences not pleasant to 
anticipate." 

His parents were healthy and well-to-do. 
He was well built and fairly well nourished. 
A thorough physical examination found no 
obvious disease. He was like a watch that 
had no apparent mechanical defect and yet 
refused to keep time. 

'*If such a boy had been brought to me 
ten or fifteen years ago,'* the doctor says, 
''I should have been able to do nothing for 
him except give him some calming drugs 
for his nerves and assure his mother that he 
would probably 'outgrow' his troubles. But 
nowadays we can do a little better than 
that. I got his mother to leave him with 
me, and as soon as I had somewhat gained 
his confidence I began to explore his mind. 

**It seemed that his chief difficulty in 
school was with arithmetic. He could not 
do 'sums.' I gave him lists of figures to 
repeat after me, and I found that very often 
when I ^ave him ?. 2 ^ 8 repeated it as a 5. 
Apparently he did that without being aware 
of it. I tried him often enough to be sure 
that the substitution was what we call a 
'compulsion* and not within his control. 
Then 1 asked him, 'Who i'^ 5?' 

93 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

*'And after a moment's thought he an- 
swered, reluctantly, * Mother/ '* 

She was 5, it seemed, because at five 
o'clock she gave herself up for an hour to 
the company of her children, playing with 
them, amusing them, telling them stories. 

''And who,*' the doctor asked, ''is 2?" 

Two proved to be both a nurse whom 
Tommy disliked and a teacher at school, 
a Miss W, who had been tyrannical. 
The nurse was round-shouldered, like a 2, 
and the teacher sat bent over her desk. He 
loved 5's as he loved his mother, and he 
loathed 2's as he loathed his teacher. Hence 
the substitution. But that substitution had 
become luiconscious and beyond his control 
— which indicated that a suppressed instinct 
was taking advantage of him. 

"I set myself to trace this action back to 
the instinct that inspired it," Doctor X 
continues, "and I foimd that the process was 
simple enough. He was more than ordi- 
narily affectionate toward his mother, and 
more than ordinarily jealous of anyone who 
shared her love. He was tingovemably 
jealous of his yoimger brother, whom I 
found to be his mother's favorite — so that 
his jealousy was justified. That jealousy 
had shown itself in quarrels, nursery vio- 
lences, small persecutions, and ungovernable 

94 



IN CHILDHOOD 

bad temper. The nurse also favored the 
younger brother; she had interfered to 
protect him from Tommy; she had taken 
sides against Tommy; and she had generally 
turned the powers of his nursery world 
against him. Consequently Tommy was in 
a state of angry revolt that made him 
impossible. When his mother remonstrated 
with him he could not explain or justify his 
conduct. He didn't know what was the 
matter with himself. He blurted out that 
he 'hated* both his brother and his nurse. 

''The mother reproved him. She told 
him that it was a sin and a disgrace for him 
to hate his brother and his nurse. No little 
boy of hers could have such feelings. They 
were shocking. They pained her. They 
made her most unhappy. 

"To Tommy, of course, his mother's word 
was more than a commandment from on 
high. By her reproaches his instinctive love 
for her was aroused to repress his emotions 
of anger and ill will against his brother and 
his nurse. But his machinery of repression 
was still immature. The emotions that he 
was trying to repress had apparently escaped 
his control when they found the symbols 2 
and 5 behind which to masquerade. More- 
over, they were presumably coming out in 
an imgovemable dislike of his teacher when 

95 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

he prevented them from expressing them- 
selves in his relations with his brother and 
his nurse." 

So far, good enough. ''Apparently" and 
''presumably," as Doctor X says, this was 
what was wrong with him. But how about 
his two "tics" — ^the continual sniffing and 
the rolling of the eyes? 

They proved simple enough, too. Miss 
W, the hated teacher, used a strong per- 
fimie. Tommy had a front seat at school 
where the odor was powerful. He had been 
in the habit of wrinkling up his nose at it 
malevolently, and one of the other pupils 
told the teacher that Tommy was sniffing 
at her, and the teacher sent Tommy to an 
undesirable seat at the back of the room 
as a pimishment. Tommy retaliated by 
continuing to sniff in order to express 
hostility. 

Similary with the rolling of his eyes. The 
teacher had accused him of glancing down, 
out of the comers of his eyes, at the written 
answers of a pupil on his left. The accusa- 
tion was unjust, and Tommy, in his resent- 
ment, had been rolling his eyes up, in the 
opposite direction, to the right. Now, when- 
ever he was displeased or resentful, he 
repressed the voicing of it, but sniffed and 
rolled his eyes up. Hence the tics. 

96 



IN CHILDHOOD 

And the phobia about automobiles? Well, 
he had seen one of his playmates run over 
by an auto on the street. It was probably 
this nervous shock that had weakened his 
repressive mechanism and allowed all his 
repressed instinctive emotions to escape in 
the disguised forms which they had taken. 
In any event, it had given him a very 
natural fear of autos. He lived in a part 
of the city where he had to cross a main 
avenue to go to school; the avenue was 
always crowded with autos, of course. He 
did not wish to go to school, because he 
disliked his teacher. ''Consequently," as 
Doctor X says, ''his fear of autos became a 
phobia — ^an imreasoning, ungovernable fear 
— in order to prevent him from crossing 
the avenue to reach his school. Like all 
phobias, it disguised a hidden wish — the 
wish, in this case, to remain at home with 
his mother." 

That was the whole trouble, then. Tommy 
was not mentally defective. He was more 
than ordinarily bright. He was simply 
shaken and bewildered by the struggle to 
repress instincts and control emotions that 
were too strong for him. A child's jealousy 
of his mother's love can be as potent as a 
husband's jealousy of his wife. Imagine 
Othello, at the height of his jealousy for 

97 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

Desdemona, suffering also under the oppres- 
sions of the Doge of Venice, being put upon 
by the authority of Desdemona*s father 
and compelled to conceal his triple rage. 
Don't you think that he might have de- 
veloped a few tics himself? 

'*It was easy enough to explain Tommy's 
iealousy to his mother/' Doctor X says. 
"She admitted that she had been uncon- 
sciously favoring the yoimger boy, and she 
imdertook to stop it. It was more difficult 
to make her sympathize with Tommy's tm- 
govemable bad temper. What is anger in 
a child? What is anger in an animal? 

'*An animal in search of food finds his 
path blocked by another animal seeking the 
same food. He wavers — ^he is about to with- 
draw. Suddenly, anger reinforces his hunger 
instinct; he overcomes his adversary; and 
gains the food that prolongs his life. Or 
an animal in flight finds his escape impeded ; 
and a frenzy of rage, reinforcing his instinct 
of flight, enables him to tear himself loose 
and escape to security. Or an animal, in 
quest of his mate, is threatened by a rival; 
anger reinforces his instinct of sex and 
produces jealousy — ^the most ruthless of all 
emotions — ^and he drives off his rival. In 
other words, anger is not a primary emotion. 
It is aroused by the blocking of an instinct. 

98 



IN CHILDHOOD 

It is a sort of emergency jack which springs 
the motor mechanism of the instinct loose 
from inertia. 

**In a child of Tommy's age the instinct 
of self-assertion is most active, most annoy- 
ing to his elders, and most certain to be 
checked by them. The checking of it is the 
most frequent cause of childish anger. 
Tommy was not only suffering with the 
anger of jealousy. He was being checked by 
his nurse in his instinct of self-assertion, and 
similarly by his teacher. 

''It was necessary to explain to his mother 
how valuable this instinct of self-assertion 
is to the formation of a child's character, 
how it gives him independence and self- 
reliance, and saves him in after years from 
a sense of inferiority and from all the im- 
happiness of too great humility and sensi- 
tiveness and inability to face the hard 
realities of life. It was necessary to show 
her, also, how this instinct of self-assertion 
might without injury be deflected into useful 
channels — ^as the sheep dog, forbidden its 
wolfish tendency to kill, satisfies its instinct 
by running aroimd the flock and herding it; 
or the retriever, originally accustomed to 
eating its prey, satisfies the deflected in- 
stinct by finding and bringing back the 
game. 

99 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

"I had to warn her particularly — as all 
mothers should be warned — apainst apneal- 
inf^ to his instinctive love for her to check 
his / self-assertiveness. One instinct can 
wholly block another, as in the migratory 
bird that is held back by the call of its 
helpless fledglings and spends days in in- 
decision, departing and returning, until one 
instinct conquers the other. Such conflicts 
and indecisions in the child are certain to 
be reproduced in his later life with ruinous 
consequences. 

''I foimd that Tommy had had no trouble 
with his first teachers. He had had none 
until he came under a teacher who attempted 
to break him, as the nurse had. The figure 2 
had become a symbol of this tyranny, just 
as the 5 S)mibolized the freedom and happi- 
ness which he enjoyed with his mother. 
The all-powerful wish to escape from tyranny 
into happiness was expressing itself in the 
substitution of 5's for 2's. It was easy 
enough to persuade Tommy that he should 
not impose on his beloved 5's all the work 
that his 2's ought to be doing, but it was 
also necessary to have his mother check the 
nurse's oppression and remove Tommy from 
the teacher's control — at least until he 
could be cured. The real work of healing 
came in the effort to connect again with his 

100 



IN CHILDHOOD 

instinctive emotions the manifestations of 
them which had been split off. 

''Although an instinct compels some form 
of physical expression, it will accept a 
lesser expression for a greater one. The 
wolfish snarl of an animal showing its teeth 
becomes the polite sneer of the cynic, 
through what we call 'a. process of physical 
minimization.' The blow of anger becomes 
the clenched hand. The face of the civilized 
man expresses emotions which would be 
given expression in action by the savage, 
and our faces are made more mobile by the 
process. In Tommy, the sniff accepted the 
duty of expressing anger the more readily 
because in many animals the sniff serves to 
denote angry disgust. 

''It was necessary to teach Tommy to say 
to himself, Tm jealous of my brother,' in- 
stead of saying, 'I hate him.' It was also 
necessary to teach him not to repress his 
anger, but to vent it in some innocent way 
— to go into another room, for instance, and 
kick a chair instead of striking his brother. 
Instead of sniffing his resentment he had 
to be taught to say to himself: 'I'm mad. 
I'm good and mad!' so as to let the 
emotion loose in its proper channel. And, 
as a matter of fact, he was so yoimg and 
his repressions were so near the surface that 

lOI 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

the whole thing worked like magic. On his 
third visit to me his tics were almost gone. 
He handled his 2's and 5's without confusing 
them. And his fear of automobiles was no 
longer a phobia. The rest was in his moth- 
er's hands, and she managed beautifully. 

"To-day Tommy is a normal boy again. 
I warned his mother against indulging his 
affection for her to such a degree that he 
might become too dependent on her, and 
he seems to be growing up a natural little 
savage, as a boy should.'* 

The blocking and repressing of our in- 
stincts takes place chieflv in childhood. It 
is then that our parents, our teachers, and 
our companions undertake to educate and 
mold us — and our rebellious instincts — in 
accordance with the precepts and social 
practices that we call *' civilization.'* That 
molding is done, at present, blindly. With- 
out any knowledge of the subconscious mind 
— without even a realization that it exists — 
the attempt is made to govern and direct it. 
The result, according to Doctor X's list of 
patients, is lamentj^Jble. 

The three examples of childish breakdown 
that I have given in this article are good 
specimens of a faulty and thwarted growth 
of instincts. Little Amy had been retarded 
in the period of infantile fear. The Irish 

102 



IN CHILDHOOD 

boy had been kept in the later period of 
dependence on his mother. Tommy Arnold 
had been repressed to the point of physical 
ruin. ''All three/' says Doctor X, ''had 
been hampered in developing the instinct 
of self-assertion, and the integrity of that 
instinct is vitally necessary to the true 
growth of the mind. 

"I should say/* he adds, "that the growth 
of the British Empire is fundamentally due 
to the English practice of sending boys to 
boarding school at an early age ; it has made 
the English adventurous colonizers. And 
the fact that the French do not easily leave 
the mother country is probably due to the 
home-keeping tendency of French family 
life. The children of the poor are more 
likely to develop initiative than the over- 
mothered children of the well-to-do, for a 
similar reason. A tyrannical parent is al- 
most certain to establish in a child a sub- 
conscious sense of mferiority that will 
depress his whole career. A child whose 
curiosity has been early discouraged will 
never be a great scientist." 

As an example of how subtle these in- 
fluences on the child can be, let me cite the 
case of another of Doctor X's patients. He 
is a promoter, engaged in obtaining money 
to finance industrial enterprises. He had 

103 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

come to Doctor X in a condition of '* nervous 
breakdown/* and the doctor noticed that 
he was depressed by a feeling of general 
ill luck. He complained that whenever he 
had a '^deal" practically arranged to the 
final detail something always happened to 
interfere with it. He related several in- 
stances of the sort. 

Doctor X said, finally, **Do you think it 
possible that you yourself are doing this? — 
that you are in some way defeating yourself?'* 

He was sure that he was not. But after 
he went away he evidently began to examine 
himself, and on his next visit he had a 
strange theory to offer. 

He remembered that as a boy of five or 
six, in Chicago, he had a rich uncle of whom 
he was very fond. One day this imcle 
brought him a ten-dollar gold piece. His 
parents were poor, and when he showed 
his mother the money she scolded him for 
** taking charity,** ordered him to return the 
gold piece, and threatened him with punish- 
ment if he ever accepted money from his 
imcle again. The tmcle was apparently 
amused by his sister*s pride. He began to 
tease the boy at every visit, trying to make 
him take money, pursuing him with it, 
smuggling it into his pocket, and tempting 
him mischievously in every way. The boy 

104 



IN CHILDHOOD 

emerged triumphant from the conflict, but 
it established an "inhibition'* apparently. 

''I find,'* he said, "in all those deals that 
failed, it was I myself who was at fault. I 
was unable, some way, to make the final 
effort that would have put them across. I 
funbled when it came to getting the money. 
And now that I've been thinking of it, I 
see that I've always had an aversion to 
taking money. I've never been able to 
drive a good bargain. I can do it on paper, 
in advance, but I can never carry it out. 
In some ways it has been because I felt 
that I was superior about money. I was 
always sort of lordly about it. I let people 
take advantage of me, even when I knew 
they were doing it. That business with my 
uncle, I'm sure, was the beginning of it." 

"This, again, may seem very far-fetched," 
says Doctor X. "My experience makes me 
confident that it Is neither far-fetched nor 
improbable. I have a patient, a very ca- 
pable intellectual woman, who always suffers 
great depression when she faces any new 
undertaking. She has to use a powerful 
effort of will to get herself started. I found 
that her father was an eccentric tyrant who 
whipped her, as she says, for everything she 
did except playing with dolls. And she has 
now one hobby that furnishes her with 

8 105 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

endless delight — she trains small children in 
folk dances. 

"I have another patient, who has a sub- 
ordinate position in an architect's office, and 
who plays the piano at neighborhood dances. 
I supposed that he did this in order to add 
to his salary. I found that his boyhood 
had been ruined by a tyrannical father, a 
musician, who conducted a striiiged or- 
chestra. He was telling me one day that 
the only praise his father ever gave him 
was for playing the piano in his orchestra, 
and he added, *He probably praised me 
for that because he didn't have to pay me.* 

'* *You never told me,' I said, 'that you 
don't take money for playing nowadays at 
dances, after hours.' 

** * Well,' he replied, * people seem to enjoy 
it so much that I never have the heart to 
ask money for it.' 

*'It is remarkable how many people will 
tell you that after they have achieved any 
success they feel unaccountably depressed. 
The common explanation is that the satis- 
faction of an instinct produces a satiety 
that is depressing. ^-As a matter of fact, the 
satisfaction of an instinct produces a state 
of comfortable inertia that is quite pleasant.^ 
It is my observation that the depression in 
all such cases is due to the fact that in child- 

io6 



IN CHILDHOOD 

hood the satisfaction of the instinct has 
been marked as shameful. If every crude 
attempt of the child to be self-assertive had 
been branded as something offensive, as 
egotistic 'showing off,' and so forth, it will 
follow that any adult triumph of the instinct 
of self-assertion, any conquest of opposing 
obstacles, will be followed by an emotion 
of guilt or shame that will be felt as a de- 
pression. The early self-expressions of the 
child rehearse piactically all the dramatic 
situations of later life. When the later 
action coincides with the early rehearsal the 
same emotions follow. If these emotions 
are conflicting emotions, we get a condition 
of *ambivalency,' as we call it. And this 
condition locks up more good energy in man- 
kind than any other one mental trouble. 
It is scarcely imaginable how many useful 
impulses are blocked by the necessity of 
carrying them forward against a feeling of 
depression which parents have engendered 
years before by branding natural childish 
tendencies as 'naughty' or 'ridiculous' or 
'bad.'" 



CHAPTER V 

IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

THE next step in Doctor X's theory of 
the subconscious mind is the most 
important of all. ''Animal life," he points 
out, ''gets into action only imder the im- 
pulse of an instinct. When no instinct 
urges it, it is inert. All its energy is pro- 
duced at the call of instincts and all its 
success and all its happiness result from the 
satisfactory reply to that call. I find, in my 
practice, that the same thing is true of man. 
The energy which we all need in our work 
cannot be released except by touching an 
instinct. The success which we ptu-sue 
cannot be won except along instinctive 
trends. The happiness which we crave 
cannot be arrived at except along the lines 
of instinctive satisfactions. There is a 
ciurent idea that good habits can be in- 
tellectually decided upon and then the will 
can be consciously instructed to carry out 
the decision. This is the method which the 
Polynesians use in order to obtain favorable 

io8 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

winds during their canoe voyages. They 
put in the bow of the canoe a box that has 
holes in all its four sides. They close the 
holes on three sides and leave open only the 
hole that faces the desired wind. Then they 
attempt by means of incantations to compel 
the necessary wind to blow into the open 
hole. Since they continue their incantations 
until the wind shifts, they have not yet 
learned to doubt the success of their magic. 

''Our method of trying to obtain success- 
ful and happy good habits, without in- 
vestigating the direction of our currents of 
energy, is just as primitive as the use of 
the Polynesian wind box. And it is less 
successful — because the currents of the air 
are variable, and a favorable wind will 
arrive if you wait long enough. Whereas 
the currents of instinctive energy are fairly 
constant, and there are courses which you 
will never be able to sail except by continual 
tacking.'* 

This is the conclusion to which he has 
come after working with hundreds of cases 
of loss of energy, inefficiency, failure, and im- 
happiness, both in childhood and in adult life. 

"The energy,*' he says, ''the happy energy 
of childhood is envied by us all. We have 
lost it. Why? What is the origin and secret 
of the energy of the child? 

109 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

**It has the same origin as energy in 
animals. Its secret is the undisturbed re- 
lation between the child's instincts and his 
actions. The child satisfies his instinctive 
needs without shame. He enjoys his in- 
stinctive pleasures innocently. He obeys 
his instinctive impulses. He represses none 
of his instinctive emotions. All his in- 
stinctive energy flows freely into action, as 
in the animal. Animal life wastes no energy. 
It goes to its goal with the full power of all 
its resources. So with the child. 

*'I find, in my practice, that the energy of 
the adult has the same origin as the energy 
of the child. Whether it is physical or 
mental energy, it is released along instinctive 
trends. It can be blocked, diverted, de- 
flected, or 'sublimated,' as we say, by the 
conscious mind, but it cannot be originally 
released except by the operation of an 
instinct." 

Well, this would seem to be a very simple 
"open sesame'* to the door of happiness 
and success. Surrender to your instincts 
and go ahead? That might be possible if 
we were all living in a state of nature. But 
we are not. Our whole civilization is a 
conspiracy against certain of our ego in- 
stincts, to check and penalize their indul- 
gence. Moreover, civilization itself is largely 

no 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

the product of our herd instinct, and the 
conflict between the desires of the individual 
and the demands of society is a conflict that 
is paralleled in man himself by a conflict 
between his ego instincts and his herd 
instinct. Hence Doctor X*s dictum, '* Suc- 
cess and happiness lie in the complete 
expression of self, transmuted into social 
values/' 

To drop theory and come to cases, let 
us take the instinct of self-assertion. It is 
one of the strongest of the animal instincts. 
It is one of the strongest of the child's in- 
stincts — ^and of the man's. And it is a much 
discouraged instinct in our social life, in 
spite of the fact that it is the very backbone 
of character and the motive power of 
success. What are we to do with it? How 
are we to handle it so as to obtain a pros- 
perous and happy issue of its unconscious 
and compulsive power? 

Consider it in the child. It begins to 
assert itself offensively as soon as he has 
learned to walk. He is a selfish little egoist. 
He will not, for example, share his candy 
with his sister. What does his mother do? 
She probably tells him that selfishness is a 
sin, that God will punish him for it. And by 
so doing she may begin in the mind of the 
child — particularly if the child is a girl — 

III 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

one of those religious conflicts between con- 
scious ideals and instinctive impulses that 
will end by wrecking the child's whole life 
if subsequent events encourage the growth 
of a religious ''complex.'' 

Or the mother punishes the child for 
selfishness, and by so doing she calls up the 
contrary instinct of self-abasement to sup- 
press the self-assertion. When two dogs 
meet' and fight and one proves the weaker 
its instinct of self-abasement is aroused to 
save it from destruction. It surrenders, 
cowers, cringes, and slinks away, in a 
humbled attitude, with a lowered blood 
pressure and a slow ptilse; and whenever 
afterward the conqueror appears the same 
instinct automatically repeats the same 
physical changes in the defeated animal and 
saves it from useless combat. That mech- 
anism operates in the child. Its accom- 
panying emotion is the feeling of shame. 
Its perfect product is the cowed child. 

His instinct of self-assertion is wholly 
blocked. His abject submission is easily 
obtained. His temper is broken. He is 
admirably obedient and a great source of 
pride to his parents. He is doomed to 
failure and unhappiness in later life. He 
will always be a coward before the frown of 
authority, and he will hate himself for it 

112 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

and hate his employer. And he will almost 
invariably repeat upon his children the 
mistakes which his parents made with him. 

''It is scarcely ever necessary to encourage 
this instinct of self-abasement in a child,'* 
Doctor X advises, ''and I should say that 
the average child never needs physical 
punishment. The loss of the mother's love 
is enough to threaten. Any child will tell 
you that it dreads the mother's anger more 
than blows. By appealing to its instinct of 
affection any parent can deflect a child's self- 
assertiveness into acceptable channels and 
stabilize it there by rewarding all efforts to 
win approval. In later years the mother's 
approval will be replaced by self -approval, 
society's approval, the approval of the herd. 
The instinct of self-assertion will have been 
successfully 'sublimated'; and the child will 
become a useful and happy citizen, public- 
spirited and publicly approved." 

The instinct of self-assertion in a child, 
then, is not to be branded as a sin or punished 
as a crime. It is to be deflected into social 
values by approval. And that is exactly 
what has to be done by the adult in his own 
case. He must recognize that his instinct 
of selfishness is not sinful, and it is not 
criminal. It is an unconscious and com- 
pulsive instinct which he must accept and 

"3 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

use as part of his mental motive power, but 
which he must know he can only use happily 
and successfully in ways that are valued 
by the herd. No amotmt of wealth and 
power and domination can bring felicity to 
any himian being imless he uses that wealth 
and power in ways that satisfy his herd 
instinct, for the good of his fellows, and with 
their approval. This is the lesson which the 
study of the subconscious mind is preparing 
for the American millionaire, for instance. 
And it was a poor psychologist among them 
who gave it out as his ideal of conduct: 
*'So live that you may look any man in the 
eye and tell him to go to hell." He was 
trying to look his own herd instinct — ^his 
own need of herd approval — in the eye, 
and tell it to go to hell. And the trouble 
is that if you succeed in sending one of your 
instincts to hell, it takes you with it. 

So much for the instinct of self-assertion 
in yourself. How are you to handle it in 
others? Whenever two free-born American 
equals meet for the first time they sub- 
consciously confront each other — exactly as 
two animals might — ^with the instinct of 
self-assertion of each bristling and growling 
in his ego. Two animals would fly at each 
other^s throats and settle the question of 
superiority at once. Primitive man used to 

114 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

do the same thing. In civilized society, 
the usages of courtesy and politeness compel 
the men to suppress the expression of their 
bridling self-assertiveness, to shake hands 
and affect friendship. But their subcon- 
scious minds shake hands as two prize 
fighters do in the ring. The battle between 
them proceeds nevertheless. One of them 
perhaps follows the good American custom 
of bluffing, meets with obstinacy or negation, 
and takes away a rancor that is due to his 
own baffled instinct. Or he is himself 
bluffed and feels a sore antagonism tmder 
his assumed deference, and carries away a 
craving for revenge. In either case the 
anger which he feels against the other man 
is in reality his anger at his own failure to 
dominate. And all this anger is lost motion, 
instinctive energy wasted, effort out of place. 
The wise man will recognize the futility of 
such instinctive nonsense between modem 
equals. 

If you are wise, then, you will meet your 
fellow man, knowing that he is a self -machine 
whose sparks are no concern of yours, and 
willing to grant him the fullest self-assertion 
that is compatible with the rights of others. 
The man whom you so meet will feel no 
obstacle to his self-assertion and he may be 
arrogant or he may not. The chances are 

IIS 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

that he will not. In any case, you will not 
waste any energy in useless conflict with 
him, and he will part from you with an 
amiable feeling and in a pleasant frame of 
mind toward you. 

If you meet him in business, or under 
circumstances which make it necessary for 
you to work with him, you will then avoid 
arousing unnecessary enmity. You will pre- 
serve your own integrity and independence, 
without affronting his. If you wish to go 
farther with him, you need only express an 
interest in anything about him that is 
really a part of his self-expression. His 
self-assertiveness will immediately embrace 
you as an asset. His imopposed ego instinct 
will meet you on terms of friendliness. In- 
stead of fighting you, it will co-operate with 
you. If you are both wise men, the co- 
operation may soon deepen into friendship. 
And whether he is wise or not, you will be 
much happier and more successful with him 
than if you had allowed your blind instinct 
to stampede you into a combat with him 
and fought out the question of superiority 
between you, primitively. Thus is an in- 
stinct molded and socialized. 

Quarrels between unsocialized rival in- 
stincts of self-assertion are the curse of mod- 
em competitive life. Theyare frequent among 

ii6 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

business magnates and the Napoleons of 
Wall Street, who are often mere cave men 
in their desire to dominate. They destroy 
themselves and the property that is in their 
control unreasonably, unintelligently, under 
an instinctive impulse to down a conflicting 
ego.- Half the quarrels within a political 
party have the • same origin. A recent 
Speaker of the House in Washington publicly 
confessed, with instinctive pride, that during 
his first term as Congressman he had voted 
and worked always in opposition to every 
measure introduced by a certain member — 
whether the bill was good or bad — because 
that member had crossed him in an am- 
bition. The struggles between capital and 
labor, between the employer and the em- 
ployee, have often this instinctive origin as 
an economic basis. 

The wise employer, recognizing the ego 
instinct in his employees, tries to enlist that 
instinct in his own service. He gets up 
efficiency contests and selling competitions 
which he rewards with prizes or promotions. 
He devises ways in which to make the 
success of the business add to the success 
of the workmen, by profit-sharing and bonus 
payments. He persuades the employees to 
buy stock in the corporation. Or, as in 
England recently, he lets the workmen elect 

117 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

a representative to the board of business 
management, and divides the excess profits 
with them after the interest on investment 
has been paid. By so doing, he engages in 
his service the ego instinct, the instinct of 
self-assertion, the creative instinct of his men. 
We call it the *' democratization of industry.*' 

The employer who insists that his business 
is ^*his business and he is going to run it** 
is the victim of his ego instinct. No matter 
how kindly and thoughtful of his men he 
may be — no matter what rest rooms and 
social centers and playgrounds he may 
provide for them — they will continue to 
mutter that they ''want justice, not charity.** 
They will be restless and disgruntled in their 
work, because the ego instinct, which is the 
great motive power of work, is not satisfied. 
If you are a wise employer you will find some 
way to satisfy that instinct in your em- 
ployees, and be happier and more successful 
by so doing. 

If you are an employee, at work in a 
business where your creative instinct can- 
not be satisfied, you will be wise to take 
your daily task on other terms. *'I have a 
patient,'* says Doctor X, ''who was caught 
in the web of resentment against his work. 
He complained bitterly of his unjust and 
critical employer. Every day something 

ii8 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

happened to put him in a fury of indignation, 
and every day his impulse of revolt was 
blocked by the dead wall of fear. If he 
angered his boss, what about his job, his 
wife, his children, his old age? 

"He had to swallow his wrath. It proved 
indigestible. He came to me to be treated for 
indigestion. He was cured by a magic device 
which you might call Hhe king in disguise.' 

'*We started with the assimiption that, 
since he had to work for an employer, he 
was a slave. We agreed, next, that it was 
in the nature of taskmasters to be cruel. 
He was a humble slave, serving a cruel task- 
master. Good. As an honest slave, he 
would do an honest day's work for his day's 
wages, put the money in his pocket and go 
home. But there, he could throw off the 
livery of slavery. With his wife and 
children, in his own home, among his friends, 
dispensing the fruits of his toil, he could be 
a king. That was his real life. There was 
his true happiness. 

''And then when he returned to his work, 
why not go as a king in disguise? Why not 
accept the terms of his slavery as a disguised 
king would, submitting to them amusedly 
until he could drop the livery at the day's 
end and return to his kingdom? 

"Why not, indeed! He tried it, and it 
119 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

cured his indigestion. The boss cannot 
irritate him now. He has escaped from the 
evil of work resentment. He is no longer 
torn by conflicting and futile emotions. His 
blocked instinct has been deflected, and he 
is happier and more successful both in his 
home and his work.** 

There is a lesson here that goes beyond 
the case in point. We Americans put our- 
selves into our work more than foreign 
peoples. And we are more successful than 
they, yes. But we are not so happy. Why? 

*'I find among my patients," says Doctor 
X, *'that the secret of happiness lies in the 
phrase, * Somebody cares.' Success in your 
work may depend on the energy that is 
released imder the instinct of self-assertion. 
But happiness depends much more on the 
satisfaction . of the instinct of affection. I 
do not believe that there can be any happi- 
ness where this instinct is frustrated, nor 
any complete unhappiness where it is satis- 
fied. No failure in life is hopeless without 
a failure in love. And no man or woman, 
in my experience, commits suicide imless 
this instinct despairs. The failure to obtain 
love is the greatest tragedy of childhood, 
and the common * death wish' of the child 
arises from it. The dominant subconscious 
fear in adult life is a fear of the loss of love 

I20 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

that IS greater than the fear of death; and 
the fear of death is often a substitute for 
it. The weakest personality can obtain 
happiness in an atmosphere of love. The 
strongest and most successful fails of happi- 
ness if he fails of love. 

*' The happy boy goes out to his playmates 
with a sense of self -approval that is founded 
on his mother's approbation of him. So the 
happy man goes to his work secure in the 
approval of the woman who has replaced 
the image of his mother in his instinctive 
mind. Outside the home, both the boy and 
the man find themselves under the com- 
pulsion of another instinct — the herd in- 
stinct — ^and in need of herd approval. The 
satisfaction of that instinct is a powerful 
factor in adult happiness, but the boy who 
suffers under the disapprobation of his 
*gang* can find some escape in his mother's 
approbation; whereas, without her approba- 
tion, the gang leader himself, the hero of 
the playground, will not be happy. And the 
same is true of the man. 

"Above all things we need to be taught 
that in order to be happy we must love and 
be loved. But we need to be taught, also, 
the terms which love insists on making in 
the instinctive mind. The first love of our 
life, the child's love for its mother, like all 

9 121 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

true love, has a double craving: it seeks 
protection, and it desires to give protection. 
The youngest child, snuggling in its mother's 
arms, will ward off a pretended attack 
upon her, and this protective attitude is 
basic and compulsive in the instinct. No 
love in adult life can be happy if it does not 
permit the protective desire to have its 
proper expression. That is one of the 
tragedies of illicit love — the man or the 
woman in a liaison finds the protective im- 
pulse of the instinctive mind frustrated by 
guilty circumstances, and the frustration 
means misery. Moreover, illicit love is 
commonly just sexual gratification, and the 
subconscious mind carries an instinctive 
horror of *sex for the sake of sex' that is one 
of its strongest taboos. It is instinctive for 
a man to hate the woman who is his part- 
ner in a purely sexual indulgence. And a 
woman's sex love even for her husband will 
die in her subconscious mind if she finds 
that he does not 'care' for her in the sense 
of feeling a protective impulse for her. 

**In other ways, too, the instinctive mind 
in love is like the child mind. The child 
registers all criticism as dislike, and it is the 
wise husband or wife who refrains from 
criticism in affection. The critic on the 
hearth is a persistent enemy of married 

122 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

happiness. The praise of our loved ones is 
as necessary to instinctive happiness as the 
approval of our mother was, and their dis- 
approval is as disastrous. 

"A child always remembers who gave it 
a gift. The tangible evidence of love is of 
enormous value to it. That peculiarity of 
the instinctive mind persists. Gifts in affec- 
tion are more winning than words. Most 
potent of all are protective actions. The 
man who criticizes or humiliates or makes 
fun of his wife, particularly before others, is 
destroying her love and his happiness at 
their foundation. Her conscious mind may 
forgive him: her unconscious mind will not. 

''To the instinctive mind, I find^ neither 
sex love nor marriage is a goal. The real 
goal is happiness in a home founded on 
protective love for another and resonant 
with the voices of children — for nature's 
goal is the creation of the child. Woven 
through the whole fabric of love runs a 
secret thread that is little understood — the 
craving for a child that shall be a reincarna- 
tion of self, a breath of eternity made real. 
The social taboo prevents a young girl from 
dreaming aloud about children, but all her 
adolescent day dreams of her hero are sub- 
consciously connected with the thought of 
a created life whose presence in her arms 

123 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

shall be the proof of the perfection of her 
womanhood. There is happiness in the 
satisfaction of that instinct and unhappiness 
in its frustration. The same thing is true, 
in a lesser degree, of the man. And he 
comes, through love of his children, to the 
great love of Christ, the love for all men." 

All this does not mean that instinct is a 
better guide through life than intelligence. 
It means only that instinct is the power 
plant which intelligence must utilize. **The 
situation/' says Doctor X, *'is something 
like the relation between the sailing master 
of a ship and the pilot. The most skillful 
pilot is helpless if he has empty sails, just as 
the most exquisite intellectual precision 
without energy is hopeless apathy. The 
most energetic sailing master without a 
helmsman or a helm is as helpless as the 
helmsman without the sailing master, though 
more destructive — ^just as instinctive energy 
without judgment is destructive. But no 
progress is possible dead against the wind, 
and no will power can make it possible. 
Will can only choose the port. Intellect can 
only chart the course, taking into account 
the winds that prevail. Those winds are 
the currents of instinctive energy which we 
must understand and utilize if we are to 

make a successful and happy voyage.** 

124 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

As it is, our education and our psychology 
talk about improving will power and ap- 
plication as you might talk about improving 
the will power and application of a hunting 
dog, instead of merely showing him the 
fox and rewarding him for catching it. And, 
at the same time, while we are talking about 
improving the dog as a hunter, we are 
beating him every time his instinct starts 
him on a chase. And then we complain of 
his apathy and lack of energy when he has 
been so beaten that the sight of game acts 
as a symbol of disgrace to him and he lies 
down cowed. 

''Almost every instinctive emotion of 
man," says Doctor X, ''has been blocked 
by the moralistic teaching that his instincts 
are base animal instincts, that he is a divine 
mind in a base animal body, that he must 
repress his 'lower impulses' or they will 
drag him down. It is as if the moralist 
argued: 'Horses are wild animals; wild 
animals are dangerous animals; dangerous 
animals should be destroyed; therefore horses 
should not be domesticated.' That is to 
say: 'Our instincts are animal instincts; 
animal instincts are dangerous; therefore 
they should be repressed, not socialized — 
destroyed, not domesticated." 

The Puritans followed this logic, and it 
125 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

made Puritanism an evil thing and marked 
its followers with the forbidding aspect of 
gloom which is the very face of himian 
failure. They waged a war of extermination 
against their strongest instincts, and the 
instincts won. In the course of that struggle 
the Puritan saw his revolting instincts as 
the devil in him, and he burned them in the 
hallucinated form of witches. He saw his 
God as a jealous and angry God, a stem 
Puritan father, repressing his children; and 
that father image still persists in our es- 
tablished American Church. It makes a 
faith that holds the women more easily than 
the men, because the father image for a 
woman is more frequently the symbol of 
affection; but the wiser religion will include 
a mother image, too, and appeal to the 
strongest instinctive affection of mankind. 

The Puritan inheritance is an influence 
that makes for unhappiness, inefficiency, 
and failure. We try to live by conscious 
ideals that are continually defeated by re- 
pressed unconscious impulses. Our morality 
becomes not a thing of high serenity, but a 
perpetual conflict. We fall and rise again 
and stumble and blunder on. We fight life's 
battle with only one hand free, holding with 
the other our '* baser selves'* in leash. '*Is 
it any wonder," asks Doctor X, ''that we 

126 



IN HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS 

have so little strength to climb the heights? 
Or that' we have constant reason to com- 
plain of lack of energy? Or that so few of 
us ever attain, even momentarily, that peace 
and comfort of mind and body which is 
happiness?" 

These repressions, that make for loss of 
energy, unhappiness, inefficiency, and ill 
health, have one definite mental effect that 
is worth remarking separately — their effect 
on memory. The study of the subconscious 
mind has shown that what we ordinarily 
call our memory is really a **forgettery." 
The subconscious mind has a complete 
record of all our past, and that record can 
be reached in dreams, or under hypnosis, or 
in delirium. If there were such a record 
always crowding into our conscious minds, 
we should be so bewildered by the con- 
sciousness of the past that we would be 
unable to focus our attention on the more 
important present. Therefore, the two are 
separated by a barrier in which there is a 
door, and on that door is a guard whom we 
call memory. When we want anything out 
of our past we call for it, and memory 
simimons it from the inner room. His 
business is to keep it out till we call for it, 
and to hurry it in to us as soon as we wish 
it recalled. 

127 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

But when we consciously repress a thing 
from our thoughts we give another guard 
an order never to admit the matter to our 
consciousness again. And he obeys us, as 
long as we are conscious. And he not only 
keeps out the repressed matter, but he keeps 
out anything connected with it that might 
drag it back. He keeps out all associated 
matters, all things incidental to it in time 
or place, all like things. And when a number 
of these repressions are involved the con- 
sequent impairment of memory is very 
great. Since a good memory is invaluable 
to the efficiency of the conscious mind, re- 
pressions injtire that efficiency enormously 
in the field of memory alone. In that way 
repressions definitely impair success, as in 
other ways they definitely impair happiness. 



CHAPTER VI 

IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

NOW, if Doctor X is correct in these 
theories of the influence of the in- 
stinctive mind upon happiness and success, 
it should be possible to apply his dicta 
illuminatingly in the analysis of such a 
happy and suc9essful man as Theodore 
Roosevelt, for example. They should satis- 
factorily explain Roosevelt's character, his 
conduct, his opinions, his beliefs, his happi- 
ness or his unhappiness, his success or his 
failure. They should offer a solution to the 
problem of his inconsistencies. They should 
generally '* pluck out the heart of his 
mystery.'Y 

This is a large order. The documents 
that might be consulted are innumerable 
and they are contradictory. In order to 
avoid controversy — and to limit the field 
of survey — ^let us take only what he tells 
about himself, consciously or unconsciously, 
in his autobiography. 

''I was a sickly, delicate boy," he says, 
129 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

'* suffered much from asthma, and frequently 
had to be taken away on trips to find a 
place where I could breathe. One of my 
memories is of my father walking up and 
down the room with me in his arms at night 
when I was a very small person, and of 
sitting up in bed gasping, with my father 
and mother trying to help me/' 

Says Doctor X: "Asthma is easily chief 
of all the bodily afflictions that cause a loss 
of hope in the child and his surrender to 
despair. The fear of suffocating is the first 
and most violent fear of life. The newborn 
child, before its lungs are working, enters 
upon a struggle against death by suffocation 
and escapes by a margin of only a few 
minutes. The horrors of smothering are 
thereby deeply imprinted on the subcon- 
scious mind as the very type and pattern of 
a death struggle. And from that time on 
any difficulty in breathing is the panic 
signal for all the instinctive forces of life 
to rally in defense of the organism. 

"In an asthmatic child, therefore, the 
organism is on the defensive, inevitably. 
The subconscious mind is also fearful and 
on the defensive. If the instinctive energies 
are weak, the child may easily succumb to 
a subconscious conviction of inferiority from 
which he will never recover. The same 

130 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

result will ensue if the circumstances of his 
life, and particularly the attitude of his 
parents, add to the opposition which his 
ego instincts have to fight. But whether he 
succumbs or not, all the trends of his in- 
stinctive mind will be conditioned by fear 
and a subconscious posture of self-defense — 
even though the posture may become one 
of defiance of fear and insistence upon 
aggressive fearlessness, as it became appar- 
ently with Roosevelt.*' 

We do not know how strong was the life 
current of Roosevelt's energy in his infancy, 
but we do know that his parents did not 
depress it. That picture of their "trying 
to help'* him to breathe is typical of their 
aid and encouragement throughout his child- 
hood. They were a wise and kindly and 
just and loving mother and father. Every 
line of his early recollections proves it. And 
from the moment that we see the father 
carrying the gasping child up and down the 
room at night — his strong arms giving the 
frightened infant his only comforting support 
against the menace of suffocation — Roose- 
velt's autobiography testifies to the care and 
kindliness of the father and to his influence 
on the formation of the boy's character, his 
aspirations, his ideals of conduct, and the 
pleasure patterns of his instinctive mind. 

131 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

''My father,'' Roosevelt wrote, "was the 
best man I ever knew. He combined 
strength and courage with gentleness, tender- 
ness, and great unselfishness. He would not 
tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, 
idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. . . . 
He never physically punished me but once, 
but he was the only man of whom I was ever 
really afraid. I do not mean that it was a 
wrong fear, for he was entirely just and we 
children adored him. ... He was a big, 
powerful man with a leonine face and his 
heart filled with gentleness for those who 
needed help or protection, and with the 
possibility of much wrath against a bully 
or an oppressor. . . . From knowing my 
father, I felt a great admiration for men who 
were fearless and who could hold their own 
in the world, and I had a great desire to be 
like them." 

Doctor X comments: ''Among animals, 
the young always imitate the parent, and 
the parent will spend hours perfecting its 
young in the imitation. It is as if instinct 
furnished the impulse to an animal habit, 
but imitation brought the habitual act up 
to standard. What we call heredity in us 
seems to be largely due to this unconscious 
impulse to imitate those elders whom we 
love. A child at play will 'make believe' 

132 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

that he is the parent, imitate the parent's 
actions, and 'identify* himself with his 
model. But the identification is largely sub- 
conscious. A parent who admonishes wisely 
but acts foolishly will be imitated in action 
but not followed in precept — which explains 
why many mothers have difficulty training 
a boy to conventional actions by precept 
while the hero-father acts as unconven- 
tionally as he pleases. Precept has almost no 
force in character formation. Imitation is 
all-powerful.*' 

Roosevelt, then, had as his hero and model 
for imitation a big, powerful, fearless father 
whom he adored and desired to be like. 
But the child being subconsciously on the 
defensive, his ambition of fearlessness ex- 
pressed itself as an ideal of holding his own 
in the world, which is a defensive ideal. 
And even this wish met with almost in- 
superable difficulties in the shape of a weak 
body. 

Not only was he sickly and asthmatic, 
but he had very poor eyesight — **so that the 
only things I could study were those I ran 
against or stumbled over.** He did not get 
spectacles until he was thirteen years old. 
''I had no idea how beautiful the world 
was,** he says, ''until I got those spectacles. 
I had been a climisy and awkward little 

133 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

boy, and while much of my clumsiness and 
awkwardness was doubtless due to general 
characteristics, a good deal of it was due 
to the fact that I could not see and yet was 
wholly ignorant of the fact that I was not 
seeing/' So handicapped, Roosevelt did 
what all children do when the facts of life 
are too strong to allow them to realize their 
ideal in actuality. He realized it in fancy. 
''Until I was fotirteen,'* he says, '*I let this 
desire" (to be fearless and hold his own in 
the world) ''take no more definite shape 
than daydreams." 

His entrance into the world of fancy was 
made through two doors — ^through stories 
that his mother told him, and through 
adventure books such as Mayne Reid's. 
His mother, he writes, "used to entertain 
us by the hour, with tales of life on the 
Georgia plantations; of himting fox, deer, 
and wildcat; of the long-tailed driving 
horses, Boone and Crockett, and of the 
riding horses, one of which was named 
Buena Vista." Observe the interest that 
he must have had in these stories to re- 
member the names of the horses. He speaks 
again of "hearing of the feats performed by 
my Southern forefathers and kinsfolk." 
And of Roswell, his mother's home, he says, 
"My mother told me so much about the 

134 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

place that when I did see it I felt as if I 
already knew every nook and corner of if 
— as indeed he had known it, in his childish 
fancy, sharing in the deeds of those fearless 
men who had held their own in the world. 
In the adventure stories of Mayne Reid*s, 
he found the fearless man holding his own 
in the world through his knowledge of 
natural history. That knowledge was power. 
He began to accimiulate it. He began to 
read natural history. One day, passing a 
market on Broadway, **I suddenly saw a 
dead seal laid out on a slab of wood," he 
says. **That seal filled me with every 
possible feeling of romance and adventure. 
I asked where it was killed. I had already 
begun to read some of Mayne Reid's books, 
. . . and I felt that this seal brought all these 
adventures in realistic fashion before me. 
As long as that seal remained there I haunted 
the neighborhood of the market day after 
day. I measured it, and I recall that, not 
having a tape measure, I had to do my best 
to get its girth with a folding pocket foot 
rule, a difficult undertaking. I carefully 
made a record of the utterly useless measure- 
ments, and at once began to write a natural 
history of my own, on the strength of that 
seal. I had vague aspirations of in some 
way or other owning and preserving that 

135 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

seal, but they never got beyond the purely 
formless stage. I think, however, I did get 
the seal's skull and with two of my cousins 
promptly started what we ambitiously called 
the * Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.* 
It was the ordinary small boy's collection of 
curios, quite incongruous and entirely value- 
less except from the standpoint of the boy 
himself. My father and mother encouraged 
me warmly in this, as they always did in 
anything that could give me wholesome 
pleasure or help develop me." 

''With the advent of this seal," says 
Doctor X, *'we enter upon a new phase of 
Roosevelt's life. Pure fancy began to fortify 
itself with fact. The recorded measure- 
ments of the seal, I venttu"e to say, gave the 
child the same increased sense of power that 
he later got from the measurements of slain 
big game. It was *a record of utterly use- 
less measurements,' as he says, but it was 
of enormous value In increasing the elation 
of self-assertion. Also it put him in posses- 
sion of a fact. He began to accumulate 
facts and to extend his ego by his power over 
them. His museum was his hoard. He 
acquired property and stored self-assertion 
in tangible assets. He began to write a 
natural history. That is to say, he wrote 
down his facts and doubled his personality 

136 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

by taking something out of himself and 
putting it on paper where he could see it. 
Beyond all else in value, these two acts of 
self-assertion were made successes by reason 
of their receiving the warm encouragement 
of his hero, the father. 

*'Here we see the beginning of a pattern 
of conduct which tended to unconscious 
repetition thereafter, as a character trend. 
Roosevelt, after any period of stress in his 
adult life, could win a sense of renewed self- 
confidence by collecting big game trophies 
and writing about them. These two devices 
were used again and again to the end of 
his days. They became a symbol of self- 
assurance that was as potent in his old age 
as it had been in his early boyhood.'* 

As an indication of the strength of the 
ego instinct in the boy, you will notice that 
he called his musetim not the **Mayne Reid 
Museimi of Natural History,*' nor the 
** Manhattan Museum," nor anything else 
but the ** Roosevelt Musetrni." How wisely 
this self-assertiveness had been left unde- 
pressed by the father may be gathered from 
Roosevelt's account of the only whipping 
his father ever gave him. He had bitten 
his sister on the arm. He ran and hid under 
a table in the kitchen, but before he hid he 
armed himself with some dough, which he 
10 137 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

got from the cook. When his father came 
after him on all fours he threw the dough 
at him, "having the advantage of him be- 
cause I could stand up under the table/' 
The throwing of the dough might have been 
an act of panic, but the providing of that 
ammunition was not the thought of a cowed 
child. 

His parents, as he says, encouraged him 
warmly in anything that could give him 
wholesome pleasure or help develop him, 
And he was protected from less kindly in- 
fluences by the fact that his ill health saved 
him from being sent to a public school where 
he would have been exposed to the cheerful 
young brutalities of the playground. This 
is important, because it prevented his self- 
assertiveness from being modified by the 
influences of his herd instinct until the funda- 
mental bones of his character were ''well 
out of the gristle." 

At the age of fourteen a strongly determi- 
native incident occurred. * ' Having an attack 
of asthma," he writes, ''I was sent off by 
myself to Moosehead Lake. On the stage- 
coach ride thither I met a couple of boys 
who were about my own age, but very 
much more competent. . . . They found that 
I was a foreordained and predestined victim, 
and industriously proceeded to make life 

138 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

miserable for me. The worst feature was 
that when I finally tried to fight them I 
discovered that either one singly could not 
only handle me with easy contempt, but 
prevent me from doing any damage what- 
ever in return.'* 

Here was a bitter discovery that all the 
devices of fancy and half fact, which had 
hitherto given him a feeling of security, were 
useless in a clash with real life. He could 
not physically hold his own with his fellows. 
He was thrown back on the raw instinct 
of self-assertion, and the energy of that in- 
stinct in him is shown in the way he sought 
out his next device and the patience with 
which he perfected it. 

"I made up my mind," he writes, **that 
I must try to learn so that I would not again 
be put in such a helpless position; and having 
become quickly and bitterly conscious that 
I did not have the natural prowess to hold 
my own, I decided that I would try to supply 
its place by training.'' This new device 
was also backed by the encouragement of 
the hero-father. ''Accordingly, with my 
father's hearty approval, I started to learn 
to box. I was a painfully slow and awkward 
pupil, and certainly worked two or three 
years before I made any perceptible im- 
provement whatever. My first boxing 

139 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

master was John Long, an ex-prize fighter. 
. . . He held a series of championship matches, 
the prizes being pewter mugs. ... I was 
entered in the lightweight contest. ... I 
won, and the pewter mug became one of my 
most prized possessions. I kept it, and 
alluded to it, and I fear bragged about it, 
for a ntimber of years." 

Now, thanks to '*the noble art of self- 
defense,'* his self-assertion, seeking only the 
defensive ideal of holding its own, had 
achieved a real success. There followed all 
the pride and elation that arise from any 
successful attempt at self-expression. **The 
hero-boxer,'* says Doctor X, ** became as- 
sociated with the hero-father as a fearless 
man who could hold his own in the world. 
Roosevelt was at last consciously free from 
the oppression of the fact of physical weak- 
ness ; and this magic device of boxing, which 
had lifted the fear, became for all time a 
sorcery of the utmost value to him. The 
devices that satisfy instincts are given a sub- 
conscious approval which places them above 
conscious criticism. ' I have never been able 
to sympathize with the outcry against prize 
fighters, ' he writes. He encouraged boxing 
as Police Commissioner of New York City 
and as Governor of New York State. Dur- 
ing his terms in the White House all the 

140 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

great pugilists received a royal welcome 
there. He enumerates their visits and is 
proud of their friendship. The identification 
even goes beyond the sphere of their ac- 
tivities with the gloves. 'Battling Nelson,' 
he writes, 'was another stanch friend, and 
he and I think alike on most questions of 
political and industrial life.' 

"I realize, of course, *' says Doctor X, 
"that this about Battling Nelson may have 
been written partly in himior and partly 
in self-assertion — the latter in defiance of 
the general attitude of criticism toward 
prize fighters of which he speaks. But the 
subconscious fact remains that, through box- 
ing, Roosevelt first began to realize his 
dynamic wish fearlessly to hold his own in 
the world; and boxing, to his subconscious 
mind, became almost a magic rite and the 
champions of the prize ring his genii of 
success. 'When I went to Africa John L. 
Sullivan presented me with a gold-mounted 
rabbit's foot for luck. I carried it through 
my African trip, and I certainly had good 
luck.' " 

Roosevelt came out of the first sheltered 
period of his life with an unchecked boyish 
instinct of self-assertion, strongly supported 
by his wish to resemble his big, leonine 
father, and fortified in his ideal of fearless- 

141 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

ness by his success as a boxer. He went 
through Harvard unchanged apparently. 
His father, on Sundays, had a mission class. 
'* Under spur of his example I taught a 
mission class myself for three years before 
going to college and for all four years that 
I was in college.** This identification with 
his father saved him from the college boy's 
usual revolt against formal religion and left 
him orthodox all his life. 

It was the subconscious effect of his poor 
eyesight, probably, that determined him 
against becoming a scientist. ^'I had no 
more desire or ability to be a microscopist 
and section cutter than to be a mathema- 
tician." And neither science nor mathe- 
matics appealed to his ideal of being fearless 
and holding his own. 

At Harvard he wrote, he says, **one or 
two chapters of a book that I afterward 
published on the Naval War of 1812. Those 
chapters were so dry that they would have 
made a dictionary light reading by com- 
parison.'* They were dry, probably, for the 
same reason that his boyish natural histories 
were dry. He was collecting facts as assets 
of personal power. He had always a pro- 
digious memory and he stored it as he stored 
his "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History." 
But he never had the meditative mind that 

142 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

broods over facts and relates them to one 
another in theories. He did not gather 
them instinctively because of his interest in 
them, but instinctively because of their value 
to him. They remained, therefore, as dry 
and detached as the facts in a dictionary. 
But his memory, being animated by his 
strongest instinct — his ego instinct — was 
always one of his keenest faculties. That, 
perhaps, is the explanation of the fact that 
with such a store of material in his memory, 
he was nevertheless always liable to think 
commonplaces and write platitudes. 

He was a fairly good student at college, 
but not brilliant. Since his period of shel- 
tered daydreaming had lasted up to the 
age of fourteen, and he entered college at 
eighteen, he must have been much younger 
in mind than his classmates. He did some 
boxing and wrestling, "but never attained 
to the first rank in either, even at my own 
weight." His social instinct was as yet un- 
developed, and his college life did not 
develop it. The college friendships of which 
he speaks are friendships with tutors and 
professors. He took no part in the college 
debates. His chief interests, he says, were 
scientific, yet a scientific career made no 
appeal to his subconscious ideal. Therefore, 
although he ''fully intended" at one time 

143 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

to make science his ''life work," he did not 
do so. Neither did he persist in the study 
of law, which he took up after he left 
Harvard. Instead, he suddenly went into 
politics. 

Why? 

He does not say, in so many words, but 
the explanation is indicated. His father had 
died and left him an income large enough 
to make it unnecessary for him to work for 
a living. Neither business, law, nor science 
appealed to his ideal of fearlessness holding 
its own. He had an aristocratic tradition 
from his Southern mother. In a world 
divided into the ''governing and the gov- 
erned," he intended to be among the 
governing. His friends, he says, told him 
"that politics were 'low'*'; that "the organ- 
izations were not controlled by ' gentlemen * * ' ; 
that they were "run by saloonkeepers, 
horse-car conductors,'* and men who were 
"rough and brutal and impleasant to deal 
with.*' He writes: "I answered that if 
this were so, it merely meant that the people 
I knew did not belong to the governing class, 
and that the other people did — and that I 
intended to be one of the governing class." 

More important than this, he saw politics 
as a field in which he might be fearless and 
hold his own, as in a boxing ring. He told 

144 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

his friends that if the '* rough and brutal 
and unpleasant men" in charge of politics 
''proved too hard-bit for me, I supposed I 
would have to quit, but that I certainly 
would not quit until I had made the effort 
and found out whether I was really too 
weak to hold my own in the rough and 
timible.'* And he adds, later: ''I no more 
expected special consideration in politics 
than I would have expected it in the boxing 
ring. I wished to act squarely to others, 
and I wished to be able to show that I could 
hold my own as against others/* 

Fortunately, added to this self-assertive 
defiance of his subconscious fear of in- 
feriority, he had an ideal of rectitude derived 
from his father. And he had a sympathy 
with the under-dog which came of his own 
early weakness and dependence. What he 
did not yet have was any development of 
his social instinct, any sense of the herd 
as the source of the power by which the 
herd was governed, any identification of 
himself with the mass of the people. He 
writes of his first term in the legislature: 
*'At one period I became so impressed with 
the virtue of complete independence that 
I proceeded to act on each case purely as I 
personally viewed it, without paying any 
heed to the principles and prejudices of 

145 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

others. The result was that I speedily and 
deservedly lost all power of accomplishing 
anything at all; and I thereby learned the 
invaluable lesson that in all the practical 
activities of life no man can render the 
highest service imless he can act in com- 
bination with his fellows.** 

It is one of the curiosities of his character 
that he learned in the legislature a lesson 
which most of us learn as children in the 
school yard. And such a lesson, learned so 
late, may make a conscious motive for con- 
duct, but does not reach the instinctive 
mind with sufficient power to affect char- 
acter. Roosevelt never succeeded in identi- 
fying himself with the herd. He remained 
always a ruler, achieving fearlessness and 
holding his own, with a high ideal of 
public rectitude and a sympathy for the 
under-dog, but consciously looking down as 
a leader for the support which he needed 
to make his leadership effective. 

In the ''rough and tumble** of ward 
politics, Roosevelt found his next hero-model, 
the successful young politician, Joe Murray, 
''fearless, powerful, energetic.*' And when, 
at the end of his second term in the legis- 
lature, he went West to live as a ranchman — 
apparently because of ill health — he found 
a new pattern of fearless man, holding his 

146 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

own in the world — namely, the Rough Rider, 
and added him to his gallery of heroes. 
Here Roosevelt built himself up, physically. 
And here he learned another device of 
fearlessness — to hit first. ** Serving as deputy 
sheriff,*' he says, ''I took in more than 
one man who was probably a better man 
than I was with both rifle and revolver; 
but in each case I knew just what I wanted 
to do, and, like David Hartmi, I 'did it 
first,' whereas the fraction of a second that 
the other man hesitated put him in a position 
where it was useless for him to resist." 

He came back into politics from the West 
with his character trends wholly formed and 
all his instinctive devices perfected. Doctor 
X sums up briefly what those trends and 
devices were: 

"A sickly, nearsighted, asthmatic boy, 
loving his father, wishes to be like him in 
fearlessness and holding his own. This 
wish is the unconscious issue of the impulse 
of self-assertion. It becomes the dynamic 
wish of his life. 

''Sickness separates him from the realities 
of life, especially as they would have been 
met in the public school. He can only day- 
dream and read. He gratifies his dynamic 
wish by pretending that he participates in 
the adventures of his book heroes. These 

147 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

heroes hold their own by a knowledge of 
nature. Knowledge of natiire therefore be- 
comes a necessity to holding his own. 

"He begins to realize his dynamic wish 
by collecting a knowledge of nature through 
half facts. He collects and he writes. He 
succeeds and he is approved. It becomes 
a habit of self. 

''Imaginary power fails to enable him to 
hold his own in a fight. He seeks a new 
means to obtain power. He finds it in the 
magic device of boxing. He succeeds and 
is approved. It becomes a habit. Physical 
training is recognized as a sort of enchanted 
armor, by his dynamic wish. Hence 'the 
strenuous life.' 

"The concentration of power necessary 
to make weakness stand up against harsh 
reality creates an unboimded egotism. This 
egotism has to be maintained through life 
as a protection to the innate consciousness 
of inferiority. But unlimited egotism is 
foimd to separate one from one's fellows. 
He learns that the adjustment of egotism 
to the demands of others is also a device for 
obtaining power. The new magic device 
is to be politic. The ward politician be- 
comes a model of egotism adjusted to the 
criticism of the crowd. He succeeds and 
he is approved. It becomes a habit. 

148 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

''There still remains unsatisfied the ad- 
venttire wish of childhood where the hero 
wins by knowledge of nature and power over 
it. He goes to the West where the wish is 
fulfilled. The plainsman becomes the model 
of acquired power, self-reliance, and the art 
of hitting first. Hence, the Big Stick, the 
Rough Rider regiment, the hunting expedi- 
tions, the trips to Africa and South America. 

** Self-assertion, physical vigor, the stren- 
uous life of adventure, political craft, collect- 
ing, and writing were all masks and devices 
to obtain for the feeling of inferiority the 
safety of the position of 'fearlessness and 
holding one's own.' " 

This certainly explains why Roosevelt, 
with all his fearlessness, never showed the 
placid courage of serene self-confidence. It 
explains the unceasing bustle of self- 
assertiveness which made his public life so 
clamorous. It explains the predatory and 
conquering air of his communion with 
Nature, as compared with the manner of 
such a naturalist as John Burroughs, for 
example. It explains his fearlessness in 
action as contrasted with his lack of fear- 
lessness in thought. It explains why he 
wrote so much, and yet wrote so little that 
was of any philosophic value. And it ex- 
plains much else. 

149 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

In public policies, such a man, if it came 
to an issue between peace and war, would 
be for war. He would be for "hitting first/' 
And he would be a consistent advocate 
of being prepared to hit first. 

In an issue between nationalism and inter- 
nationalism, he would be for nationalism, 
because his patriotism wotild be an extension 
of his ego, and he wotild be for "America 
first" as he would be for himself first — ^and 
let his opponent be the same. 

As a reformer, he would be an individ- 
ualist, not a socialist. He would hand 
reform down from above. He would be 
a rebel against any power in politics that 
attempted to depress him, and if that power 
were in command of his own party he would 
split his party. 

If he formed a new party, he would need 
to win with it. He could not continue a 
losing fight that was plainly hopeless. He 
was not the stuff of which martyrs are made. 
He had an instinctive need to win in order 
to hold his own in the world. 

He would have the same memory for 
men that he had for facts. And he would 
collect men, as he collected facts, in support 
of his ego. But he would be a poor judge 
of men, as he was of facts, because he would 
be instinctively interested in only one thing 

150 



IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

about men — their usefulness to him. And 
he would be easily deceived by any enemy 
who avoided making the signal that aroused 
his defensive pugnacity and who came into his 
confidence in the disguise of a friendly aide. 

Anyone who will take the trouble to 
read Roosevelt's Autobiography ^ with this 
theory of him in mind, will find many other 
proofs of its correctness. And he will find 
something else. 

Says Doctor X: ''We have been believ- 
ing that a child's character is formed by 
admonition and precept on the part of the 
parent, the teacher, and the Church, and 
by will power and perseverance on the part 
of the child. It is becoming evident that 
this belief is wholly false. The child's 
character is formed, as Roosevelt's was 
formed, by an unconscious wish, that arises 
out of his imitation of some loved elder, 
whom he impersonates in thought and act. 
This wish owes its great power to the fact 
that it is a part of the great instinctive 
energies of life, and, like all desires, supplies 
its own dynamic drive. As a rule, the need 
to use will power merely indicates some 
defect of character — some state of opposition 
in energies that should be working in 
harmony. 

"Roosevelt himself believed that he used 
151 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

will power. It is apparent, from his own 
story, that what he felt as will was his desire 
to be like his father. That father, to my 
mind, deserves to rank among the great 
fathers of history. He exhibited traits of 
character in himself which his son could 
imitate to advantage. He never alienated 
his son by indifference or ill treatment. And 
he encouraged the boy by approving his 
every attempt at self-expression, no matter 
how simple or how fanciful. By so doing, 
he made it possible for a child, physically 
inferior and handicapped from the beginning 
of his struggle with life, to achieve one of 
the most conspicuous personal successes 
that our generation has seen. 

*'The mother's influence cannot often do 
this for a boy. The mother is the symbol 
of love and conscience. To act so as to 
receive her love is the greatest of human 
rewards. To act so as to cause her sorrow 
is the deepest of guilts. But a mother's 
love is often too impatient to wait for worthy 
efforts in the boy or to clearly picture the 
goal to which those efforts should be directed. 
The typical American father who leaves his 
son wholly to the mother's influence is doing 
the boy a great wrong. That, above all 
else, it seems to me, is the lesson of P'^^c^. 
velt's life.'' 

152 



CHAPTER VII 

IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

AMONG Doctor X's patients there is a 
IX brilliant but extremely irritable man 
who came to be treated for indigestion and 
headache. **He was,'* says Doctor X, ''the 
most irritable person I have ever known — 
and I have known many." His irritabil- 
ity was his strongest characteristic, and it 
affected his whole life and produced for 
himself and everyone around him much 
unhappiness. 

He was especially irritable in affection, 
and his mother — of whom he was most fond 
— seemed to "get on his nerves" more than 
anybody else. He was almost impossible 
at the table. He was morbidly critical and 
sensitive about his food and the manner in 
which it was served; in fact, he had come to 
the point where he had to inspect the 
kitchen and be satisfied about the cook 
before he could eat with an appetite. He 
had weird objections to foods of certain 
colors and consistencies. After he had eaten, 

11 153 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

any suspicion that a dish had been unwhole- 
some would make him acutely ill. And, 
thanks to this sensitiveness of the nerves 
that control digestion, any nervous strain, 
any worry, or any business irritation pro- 
duced a digestive explosion and a migraine 
that made brain work impossible. 

The whole trouble proved to be un- 
conscious. It traced back to the first year 
of his life. For some reason — which had 
been forgotten — his mother had failed to 
induce him as an infant to nurse at the breast. 
She had equally failed to get him to accept 
a rubber nipple. She had been compelled 
to feed him with a spoon, and his meals 
had been always followed by colic, digestive 
irritation, and fits of screaming. As soon 
as he could take solid food he developed all 
sorts of prejudices about its appearance, 
its color, its hardness or softness. In short, 
his unconscious mind in childhood had never 
known the "comfort values" of the act of 
feeding. His instinct of affection for his 
mother had been involved, from the be- 
ginning, with the sense of bodily irritation, 
and that complication still persisted, quite 
unconsciously. 

Says Doctor X: **The comfortable satis- 
faction of bodily cravings in an infant is the 
necessary foundation of a firm character. 

154 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

The placidity and self-confidence of later 
years have their source largely in the early 
unconscious contentment which the infant 
obtains from healthful and regular habits 
of feeding, digestion, and sleep. ^ I have yet- 
to find among my patients a bottle-fed baby 
who has these characteristics of quiet sta- 
bility of temperament." 

One of his nervous patients is a young 
woman to whom he recommended the 
leisurely warm bath as a thing of '* uncon- 
scious comfort value" to start the day. He 
found at once that the prescription was 
wrong. Her morning bath left her irritable, 
depressed, and filled with vague feelings of 
resentment against the world and its in- 
justice to her. Since she took a bath every 
morning, she always sat down to breakfast 
in this difficult mood, and the meal generally 
ended in a miserable scene of misunder- 
standing and unhappiness. 

On going back over her childhood, Doctor 
X discovered that as a baby she had always 
been given her bath by an elder sister to 
whom the task was apparently distasteful. 
She had been washed in cold water, with 
soap stinging in her eyes, perfunctorily 
dried, and left sticky with the remains of the 
lather. A dumb sense of careless unkind- 
ness and injustice had invariably ensued. 

155 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

And now, no matter how warm and com- 
fortable the bath was, it brought back the 
same subconscious emotions and sent her 
down to breakfast in a mood of martyred 
depression. 

These two cases are examples of the value 
of what Doctor X calls *'nest comforts" in 
affecting character. *'The normal infant," 
he points out, ^'grows himgry, cries, fills 
his stomach, expels the residues of digestion, 
cuddles up in comfort, and sleeps until the 
cycle repeats itself. He should be carefully 
protected in this round of conduct, not only 
in order to establish his health, but to base 
his character. Man is a nesting animal; he 
gains a subconscious feeling of security in 
life from the nest comforts of infancy; and 
any lack of those security comforts will leave 
him liable to imconscious timidities that 
may show as a lack of self-confidence and a 
basic infirmity of character. Home is the 
first thought of the frightened child or the 
fear-stricken man, and the thought of home 
should carry to the instinctive mind all the 
unconscious feelings of security that the 
escape to the burrow gives the hunted 
animal." 

He has among his patients a well-known 
artist, of considerable reputation, whose 
work has been greatly impeded by his self- 

156 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

distrust. The feeling had become so morbid 
that it was blocking all his creative efforts. 
It showed in his dreams as a heightened 
self-disgust and shame. Through these 
dreams, the feeling was easily traced back 
to an incident in his childhood when his 
mother had reproved him, with great disgust 
and aversion, because he had shown an 
infantile curiosity about one of his bodily 
processes. She had been horrified and 
ashamed of him. Her contempt had made 
him deeply ashamed of himself. Being a 
sensitive child, this feeling had been per- 
petuated by lesser criticisms in later child- 
hood — criticisms that might ordinarily have 
passed without ill effect. He was now suffer- 
ing from a permanent defect of confidence 
that made any successful effort impossible 
to him. 

Says Doctor X: ''The first stability of a 
child^s character is rooted in the feelings 
of pleasure and power which he gets from 
performing his bodily functions satisfac- 
torily. His interest in these processes is 
natural and normal. His curiosity about 
them is equally so. To make him suddenly 
ashamed of them, or of his curiosity con- 
cerning them, is likely to impair his self- 
respect permanently and to check his in- 
tellectual curiosity at its source. He should 

157 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

be allowed to grow out of this period without 
reproof, and educated through his instinct 
of imitation." 

That unconscious instinct of imitation is 
incredibly powerful in molding character. 
Here is a child, of five years of age, who wakes 
up regularly at two o'clock in the morning 
terrified and trembling. There is no ex- 
planation for it until we find that the 
mother, during the nursing period, was sub- 
ject to attacks of psychic fear that seized 
her always at two o'clock in the morning. 

Here is a young woman who is terrorized 
by high winds, panic-stricken in railroad 
tunnels, unable to travel in the Subway, 
never really happy unless she is living in a 
country house with wide grounds, passion- 
ately fond of motoring slowly in the cool 
night air in an open car, a ** fresh-air fiend" 
to all her acquaintances, and by such 
peculiarities made difficult in her choice of 
residence, route of travel, manner of amuse- 
*ment, and so forth. AH these character- 
istics take their beginning from a story told 
to her by her mother in early girlhood. 
When she was bom, after prolonged labor, 
her anguished mother lay without an anaes- 
thetic, watching the doctors attempting to 
resuscitate her apparently stillborn child. 
They used a common method of forcing 

158 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT . 

respiration, by swinging the infant rapidly 
through the air, holding it by the arms. 
The mother's account of her suffering, while 
she watched the doctors, and the young girl's 
imaginative sympathy for her own danger of 
suffocation as an infant, had made such an 
impression on her that the unconscious mech- 
anism of respiration had been affected. Any 
difficulty in breathing, whether real or imag- 
inary, put her in a panic which no persuasions 
of reason could allay. Hence the effect of a 
high wind that ''took away" her breath. 
Hence, too, the feeling of suffocation in 
tunnels. Subways, Pullman berths, closed 
rooms, etc. 

An unconscious imitation of the mother or 
father may easily form ideals of conduct 
that will determine the course of a whole 
life. Here is a young woman who at the 
age of five found her mother crying '*as if 
her heart would break." She was morbidly 
devoted to her mother, and when her mother 
told her that the father had left her for 
another woman she conceived a violent 
hatred for him. '**A11 men are bad," the 
mother said. ** They always hurt those who 
love them." 

At seven, this child told the family doctor 
that she ''would never marry," because all 
men were "bad." As a young woman in 

159 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

a Sunday-school class, she explained that 
girls remained unmarried because the men 
had '*such low ideals/* She was attractive 
to men, but she remained imresponsive to 
them. 

Finally, as she grew older, she decided, 
reasonably, that she ought to marry, and 
she began to seek and encourage love. But 
now a strange thing happened. At a certain 
stage in her progress toward marriage, she 
would be checked by the conviction that 
the man was not as good as he should be. 
No amount of reasoning with herself could 
remove the feeling. It affected her like an 
''intuition," and she could find no happiness 
or peace of mind until she freed herself 
from the engagement. This occurred again 
and again. It was quite unconscious and 
inexplicable to her. She did not suspect 
its origin. She continued to struggle against 
it and to submit to it. ^'Me^while," as 
Doctor X says, ''the blocking of all her 
instinctive craving for a mate and a child 
dammed up a lot of creative energy that 
produced all sorts of nervous irritability 
and ill health" — from which she was at 
last released by having the subconscious 
sources of her whole problem made clear 
to her. 

"A man tells me," says Doctor X, "that 
1 60 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

golf IS better for him than medicine, and 
better for all men. He has every sort of 
intelligent and scientific argiiment to support 
him. I listen patiently. It begins to appear 
that he always plays golf in a peculiar soft 
felt hat, gray and limp, in old baggy trousers, 
and a shirt open at the throat. His friends 
make fun of this costume, but he sticks 
to it. Good. As we go on with our talk, 
1 learn that as a boy his father was his great 
pal. They went fishing together, spent 
hours in the open, and had the time of their 
lives. It develops that on these jaunts the 
father always wore the costume that is now 
so necessary to the proper enjoyment of 
golf. The man is right. Golf, played in 
those clothes, is more valuable to him than 
any medicine he can take.'* 

The unconscious imitation of the father 
or mother is responsible for the fact that 
so many of us are ''born,*' as we say, to a 
religious faith, a political party, a profession, 
or even a habit. In religion or politics, 
the unconscious mind having accepted the 
faith as right in childhood, the conscious 
mind in later years accepts all the arguments 
that support the faith and gives them forth 
as reasoned conclusions. The choice of the 
profession is made in boyhood, and the 
practice of it is subsequently accepted as a 

i6i 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

thing of ' ' inherited aptitude. ' * As for habits 
— here are two brothers, both of whom 
smoke constantly. The younger smokes a 
pipe; he was his father's favorite, and his 
father always smoked a pipe. The elder 
brother smokes only cigars. He was the 
favorite of an uncle who smoked only cigars. 
The younger will assure you that there is 
no real satisfaction in a cigar. The elder 
will tell you he has often tried to enjoy a 
pipe, but cannot. 

''One of my patients," says Doctor X, 
''is a nervous woman who woiild find herself 
breaking down at her work, go to the country 
for a holiday, and come back worse than 
when she left. She had been born in the 
country and spent a tragically unhappy 
childhood there. I sent her for her holiday 
to a big hotel at a crowded seaside resort. 
She came back rested and refreshed. It is 
a medical mistake to leave out these con- 
siderations of unconscious character trends 
in the choice of a vacation and to prescribe 
it in terms of diet, rest, and exercise." 

Here is a man who annoys his wife by 
forcing her always to wear a small hat. 
He has a well-argued esthetic theory that 
a woman's hat should not break the line 
of the head. He can be very eloquent and 
convincing about it; he is irritated if his 

162 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

wife wears a hat with a brim that keeps the 
sun out of her eyes; and she has to suffer 
in order to look beautiful to him. Under 
the doctor's questions he confesses that his 
mother — to whom he was most devoted — 
always wore bonnets. He cannot remember 
having ever seen her in a large hat. 

And here is another patient who is always 
teasing his wife to wear earrings. Earrings, 
to him, have a peculiar fitness. They seem 
to make the face more balanced and beau- 
tiful. He admires especially the very ornate 
and bangled earrings of the crinoline period. 
His taste is explained by the discovery of a 
picture of his mother wearing such earrings 
and by her recollection that, as a baby, 
she used to let him play with the earrings 
to stop his crying. 

Says Doctor X: **The subconscious or- 
igin of many of our aesthetic tastes and 
ideals of beauty is yet to be explored. It 
explains why standards of beauty vary in 
different countries, for example. And it 
accounts for many idiosyncrasies of taste 
that are otherwise quite puzzling." 

A business man, engaged in promoting 
new investments, suffers from lack of self- 
confidence. He has a peculiar trait of 
character; he is very lavish in his tips, and 
when he dines in a restaurant he bribes the 

163 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

waiters, the head waiter, the bus boy and 
what not to give him extra service and 
attention. It is a joke among his friends 
that whenever he takes a meal he has to 
have all the servants in the place standing 
behind his chair. He has begun to feel that 
this characteristic is a weakness in him and 
a sort of snobbishness. He is worried by it. 

Doctor X finds that the patient was bom 
in India. His father was a high official. 
He had a large retinue of native servants 
who obeyed **the young master*' as if he 
were the Crown Prince. Their willing service 
was a ''security value'' to the boy. Any 
similar service has now a similar value. 

Doctor X advised him: ''Whenever you 
have to face a business deal in which you 
will need all your self-confidence go to some 
restaurant in which you are well known, 
bribe every servant in sight, and let them 
kowtow to you as much as you please while 
you lunch. It will help you to carry the 
deal through. Always buy up every servant 
you come in contact with. Bribe your 
elevator man, your barber, your office boy. 
It will be money well spent." 

He adds: "It is the part of wisdom for 
any man to watch for these unconscious 
aids to happiness and success, and to in- 
dulge them. They are not weaknesses. 

164 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

They are supports. And this man's need 
of the 'loyal subject' is so common in 
himianity that it makes the tipping system 
inevitable." 

Now let us examine some less superficial 
character trends. 

An aggressive young architect, who came 
to Doctor X in the ordinary course of 
practice, showed this strange characteristic: 
if he were elbowed out of his place in the 
queue at a ticket office, he not only felt no 
resentment at the injustice, but he accepted 
it with pleasure and relief. On going into 
the matter, it appeared that he always 
yielded his place in any such situation not 
with meekness or subserviency, but with 
secret satisfaction and a queer sense of good 
luck. **The analysis of this uncommon 
reaction,'* says Doctor X, *' explained two 
other peculiarities of the patient. The first 
was that as an architect he had a strong 
aversion to planning terraced effects in 
courts and gardens. The second was that 
he had an exaggerated faith in luck, and 
seldom worried over any lack of success in 
a project, but attributed every failure to 
some sort of vague fate that overruled his 
efforts." 

These characteristics were explained by a 
reminiscence of his childhood. His early 

165 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

school days had been spent at a boys* 
seminary that was built on a hillside. The 
playground was a series of terraces. One 
day while he was playing leapfrog on an 
upper terrace a group of boys below him 
were preparing their target rifles to go to the 
shooting butts — for the school was a sort 
of military academy also. Among those 
with whom he was playing there was a 
classmate who was always teasing him, and 
just as he took his turn in the game this boy 
tripped him, threw him sprawling, and took 
the jimip in his stead. At that moment 
a gun exploded on the lower terrace. The 
bullet struck the boy who had taken the 
jump, and he began to run wildly down the 
terraces, pursued by Doctor X's patient, who 
did not know what had happened and ran 
after him, in a rage. At the bottom of the 
terraces the first boy suddenly turned a 
somersault like a shot rabbit and fell dead. 
The second boy attacked him angrily before 
he woke to what had occurred. 

He was, of course, struck cold with horror. 
He realized that his playmate had brought 
the accident on himself by jumping out of 
his turn, and this was a shocking example 
of the efficacy of luck. At the same time, 
he felt that if he had not been thrust out of 
his turn, the bullet would have found him. 

i66 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

And at the funeral services in the school 
chapel he imagined that all the relatives of 
his dead playmate looked at him accusingly, 
as much as to say, '* You should have been 
lying there — not he.'* There was a sense 
of secret and guilty exultation in the thought. 
'* The whole incident," says Doctor X, *' strik- 
ing a sensitive and impressionable boy, left 
him with a horror of terraces, a fatalistic 
dependence on luck, and an impaired instinct 
of self-assertion that permitted him to 
accept second place in anything with a feeling 
of relief and security. He was quite un- 
aware of the origin of these characteristics. 
He had never connected them with the 
incidents of his school days.*' 

A settlement worker came to Doctor X 
broken down with overwork and gastric 
disorder. Her chief symptoms were nausea 
and vomiting. ** These," says he, *'are ex- 
pressions of unconscious disgust. I asked 
her what phases of her work among the 
poor had first given her a feeling of disgust. 
With an expression of aversion and a 
gesture as of pushing something away she 
replied: *0h, the vermin! They made me 
sick! The people didn't seem to mind, 
and I couldn't understand that, but they 
have souls like other people and I felt it 
was my duty to endure the unpleasant 

167 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

things in order to serve them. Christ never 
felt disgust for the lowliest of creatures. It 
seemed to me that I failed in my Christian 
duty. So I fought off my feelings and went 
on with my work until I was too weak to 
stand. But I want to go back just as soon 
as I can. I have put my hand to the plow.* " 

She proved to be a New England girl 
raised in the strictest Puritan tradition by a 
mother who had a morbid ideal of domestic 
cleanliness and order. To have vermin in 
the house was an unspeakable disgrace 
that amounted to a secret infamy. The 
girl had been taught to react with instinctive 
disgust against any slightest uncleanliness 
of body or mind. Her work among the 
poor had been a protracted martyrdom of 
her instincts. ' ' Instincts control the body, ' ' 
says Doctor X, ''and when they are opposed 
in conduct they will incapacitate the body. 
Her illness was their revolt against a course 
of life which her childhood training had 
made subconsciously impossible for her/* 

Another of his patients is a well-to-do 
young woman of a type that novelists de- 
light to portray. She is defiant of con- 
ventions and outrages them impulsively, 
though she generally regrets it afterward 
in secret. She is reckless of danger, par- 
ticularly if she is warned against it, and she 

i68 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

worries her family by driving her motor car 
too fast, especially at night, when she de- 
lights to take long, lonely rides through the 
countryside. She is ungovernably impatient 
with anyone who procrastinates or comes 
late to an appointment — although she is 
often late herself. She cannot bear to be 
deceived, or put off with vague explanations, 
or treated with anything but downright 
truth and seriousness even in the most 
trivial concerns. And she is always quarrel- 
ing with her fianc6 because he has an easy- 
going and good-natured way of evading her 
earnestness and putting her off. All these 
qualities and characteristics of hers she re- 
gards as virtues, although they are accom- 
panied by a great deal of emotional friction 
that keeps her upset and unhappy and 
nervously unwell. 

The explanation of her character lies 
wholly in her childhood. Her mother was 
an overanxious and unreasonably apprehen- 
sive woman whose every admonition to her 
daughter began with a "don't." The girl 
had a restless vitality and a strong self- 
assertiveness. She early revolted against 
her mother's timidities. Warned against 
going out alone in the dark, it became her 
childish delight to steal away from the house 
at night and make more or less fearful ex- 

12 169 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

plorations of the neighborhood, and this 
pleasure persists in her night-motoring. By 
the time she had arrived at adolescence, 
anything that was forbidden by the beloved 
mother became an object of wild desire. 
Later, anything opposed by her family, her 
fiance, or by social convention had the same 
fascination for her. Hence her apparent 
recklessness of conduct and her subsequent 
regret. 

As for her hatred of deception — as a child 
she was dependent upon older girls for 
companionship. She * * tagged around ' ' after 
them in a way that probably annoyed them. 
They used to get rid of her by playing tricks 
on her — sending her on errands and hurrying 
off together before she returned — or getting 
her to play blindman's buff and running 
away while she was blindfolded — or pre- 
tending that her mother had sent for her 
and disappearing when she went into the 
house. These tricks kept her in a daily 
rage, planning revenge. Now, any slightest 
deception, no matter how good-natured — 
especially if it is done in an attempt to 
manage her — arouses a vindictive anger out 
of all proportion to its cause. 

Her hatred of procrastination and of easy 
promises that are not kept comes from her 
childhood experiences with a relative who 

170 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

was always promising her wonderful things 
for next week — Shetland ponies, and any- 
thing else that she could think of — and who 
always cheerfully disappointed her and en- 
joyed mischievously the fury of childish 
rage with which she attacked him. It was 
a sort of game with him. He never failed 
to persuade her that he would bring the 
gift, and the more enraged she was the more 
he enjoyed it. 

With all her dislike of procrastination and 
the breaking of promises in others, she finds 
it difficult herself to keep appointments, be- 
cause she hates to be tied down to an hovir 
or a course of action. It lessens her in- 
dependence, and she revolts' unconsciously. 
She is almost invariably late in keeping her 
engagements, although she arrives breathless, 
having hurried all the way. 

Every student of human nature knows 
that character comes out most strikingly in 
affairs of love. It is interesting to see how 
the various peculiarities in love and marriage, 
as exemplified in Doctor X's cases, fall into 
groups. 

There is the group of those who, for any 
one of a score of reasons, have failed to get 
the parent's affection in childhood. When 
the failure is complete, and the parent image 

has not been the symbol of affection, the 

171 



THE SECRET SPRINGS. 

instinct of love is blocked and a happy 
marriage made impossible. The parent im- 
age may even become the symbol of sex 
antagonism and marriage be used imcon- 
sciously as a mechanism for subjugating the 
partner. In a girl of beauty and charm, 
the same failure of the love image may 
produce the *' vampire" type. 

A much larger group of patients is made 
up of those who have suffered a partial 
failure of the love image, whose parents have 
been affectionate, but overharsh in criticism 
or actually cruel. Love with them is the 
*' bittersweet love" of the poets — ^part affec- 
tion and part hate. It is almost always 
accompanied by depression, anxiety, and 
fear of disappointment. It is jealous and 
suspicious. And if this duality of love and 
hate is very strong, it may affect the whole 
mental life with indecision and ^'ambi- 
valency" — as the psychologists call it — so 
that the victim of it is unable to make a 
choice or come to a firm decision in the 
simplest matters. 

Excessive love from the parent sets the 
basic characteristics of another group. This 
excess may result in such a fixation on the 
parent that marriage is impossible. Or it 
may lead to the transference of the young 
affection to a mature person, or to a type 

172 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

identical with the parent, or to a family 
relative, such as a cousin. Or the con- 
sciousness of dividing the mother's love with 
the loved father may produce in the son a 
feehng of pleasant security in loving an 
engaged girl, or a widow, or any woman who 
has been previously possessed by some one 
else, and a similar effect may ensue with a 
daughter. Or excessive love from the parent 
may lead to ** narcissism'' — which is ex- 
aggerated self-approval — ^to a craving for 
indulgence and adulation and a self -worship 
so extreme that the child fails to develop 
the true protective instinct in love. Such a 
boy or girl is above being protected and is 
too selfish to protect. The boy makes his 
mother a slave to his self-esteem and there- 
after exacts abject and slavish service from 
all women. His amatory emotion is a 
sexually formed self -ambition and never real 
love. The same thing will be true of the 
girl. 

In the countries where parents are com- 
monly harsh in their authority, as for 
instance in Russia, the ideal of woman 
conquest in man and of the vampire type in 
woman will be more frequent than in such 
a civilization as ours, where children are 
more indulged. The recurrence of the vam- 
pire in the novels of Turgenev, and the 

173 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

other Russian realists, is in striking contrast 
with their rarity in oiir native fiction. 
Observe also the popularity in continental 
literature of the sensitive hero who is suffer- 
ing with an "inferiority complex" due to 
parental dominance, and consider how his 
place is taken in our novels by the robustious 
and self-assertive hero who "does things." 

The division of character along these 
latter lines gives us two universal contrast- 
ing types — Napoleon and Hamlet. In 
America, the Napoleonic ideal is incredibly 
prevalent in the subconscious mind. It 
crops out in the common slang about the 
"Napoleons of Wall Street," "the Napoleon 
of finance," "the Napoleons of the theater." 
There is even a slang phrase for it, "He 
has the Napoleon bug" — used in referring 
to those captains of industry who collect 
busts and portraits and relics of Napoleon, 
and present their wives with Josephine's 
fan, or her bed, or her boudoir mirror, or, 
like Uncle Ponderevo in Wells's Tono-Bungay, 
pinch the ears of their favorites with im- 
perial playfulness. In the unsocialized sub- 
conscious mind, this desire for personal 
power and domination is basic and com- 
pelling. And there is enough of it left in all 
of us to account for the never-ending popular 
interest in Napoleon, the conquering hero. 

174 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

Hamlet's appeal is to the sensitive and 
depressed who are the conquered instead of 
the conquerors of reality. Poets, artists, and 
dreamers meet that fate. The sickly child, 
unable to triumph in the physical contests 
of the playground, attempts to compensate 
with mental attainments, takes to books and 
the consolations of fantasy, and becomes 
the imaginative dreamer. As a boy, he is 
awkward, self-conscious, shy, and sensitive. 
If he becomes notable as an artist, the ego 
that made him precocious now makes him 
domineering and vain, but the subconscious 
feeling of inferiority persists, and he is 
touchy in his vanity, envious, self-distrustful, 
subject to easy depression and discourage- 
ment and unbelievably petty at times. The 
poet Byron's clubfoot was the physical 
index of these qualities in him. The dia- 
bolical contradictions in the poet Pope are 
inexplicable without his crooked spine. The 
novelist Dostoievsky had an ** inferiority 
complex" so marked that it may be studied 
in some of his stories as in a clinic. Most of 
the vagaries of the *' artistic temperament" 
come from the subconscious sense of in- 
feriority and the internal conflict that accom- 
panies it. 

All of this sums up to the conclusion that 
character is almost wholly a product of the 

175 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

instinctive mind. The character of a child 
begins to form before the conscious in- 
telligence is developed. An xmconscious 
ideal for imitation is soon accepted and this 
ideal becomes basic. Any departure from 
the ideal is felt vaguely, throughout life, 
as wrong conduct, even when the intelligence 
offers no protest to it. The influences of 
the parent and the home are most powerful 
in forming this ideal, and that fact, as Doctor 
X points out, ** throws a hitherto unsuspected 
and formidable responsibility upon the 
parent.** It also gives an unexpected sup- 
port to the belief that the home is the 
corner stone of the whole social system. 

Outside of the home, the most potent 
single factor in the formation of character 
lies in the reactions which surround the 
instinct of fear in religion. *' Fear reactions," 
says Doctor X, '*are primarily connected 
with danger to physical life and express 
themselves in bodily and emotional de- 
pressions. In the very dawn of savage 
life they were transferred to a totally 
different danger. 

**When man first became free to form an 
idea, apart from instinctive impulse, one of 
the first conceptions that he arrived at, 
apparently, was the difference between the 
living and the dead. That difference seemed 

176 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

to him to lie in the absence of breath in the 
dead. The breath which left the living 
when they died was to him the spirit, the 
invisible soul. Our word 'spirit' is the 
Latin word for breathing, spiritus. 

"This soul he believed immortal, but he 
believed also that it was threatened by evil 
influences and that it could be protected 
by various sorts of incantations. His in- 
stinct of fear, with its depressing power over 
bodily functions, became involved in the 
protection of the soul, and man reacted 
more to the fear of losing his soul than to 
the fear of losing his Hfe. It is an example 
of the transference of an instinct from a 
bodily to a mental habit. The importance 
of this instinct of soul fear at the present 
time is due to the influence of our religious 
education on the mind of the child. 

"He is taught to believe in original, an- 
cestral sin. He is taught that he will lose 
his soul imless he is saved or restored to a 
state of grace. He is first reduced to a 
'conviction of sin' — ^which is a profoundly 
depressive instinctive fear reaction — and he 
is then rescued from this depression by 
means of 'salvation,' and the anguish of 
despair is replaced by the elation of success. 
Nearly all religions use this device. 

"The instinctive mind is thus tuned to 
177 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

react to the depression of the guilt of sin 
and is habituated to the use of a device 
to restore joy. If, in later years, intellectual 
doubt destroys the efficacy of the device, 
the unconscious mind continues to pile up an 
accumulated conviction of guilt from which 
it has now no means of escaping. From the 
point of view of the psychologist in medicine, 
this is the greatest disaster of modern civili- 
zation. Its issue in ill health, depression, 
anxiety neuroses, melancholia, and insanity 
is lamentable beyond expression." 

Doctor X has had a great number of these 
cases of soul fear. I wish to give one that 
is interesting because of its unconscious 
effect on conduct, and because the treat- 
ment by which he cured it is typical. 

'*Some time ago,'* he says, "a young 
business man came to me suffering with 
great bodily weakness, indigestion, insonmia, 
and a discoloration of the skin. He was 
unable to do more than a half-day*s work. 
He was depressed, dejected, without energy. 
No physician had been able to discover any 
organic disease as the cause of his condition. 
A thorough examination convinced me that 
there was no disease present. His symptoms 
seemed to me to be the physical evidences 
of complete moral defeat. He was exactly 
like a cowed and beaten animal that is 

178 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

prevented from crawling away to hide. I 
began to go into his history in search of 
the sources of his failtire." 

It seemed that he had been bom outside 
the city on a farm where his invaUd wife 
and infant daughter were now living. As a 
child he grew up happily in a happy home. 
His father had been a very religious man, 
but very kindly, and his relations with his 
son had been most affectionate. The mother 
also had been pious and loving. She had 
particularly taught her son that it was a 
great sin to hate anyone or wish ill to any- 
one. The married life of the parents had 
been ideal, and the father was always im- 
pressing upon the son that the success and 
happiness of the household was due to his 
having married a good and healthy girl. 
The boy's unconscious ideal of conduct was 
formed on this pattern. 

When he was fifteen years old he fell in 
love with the daughter of a neighboring 
farmer, but her parents were so strict in 
their care of her that he had no opportunity 
to see her alone, and he was so bashful that 
he did not get beyond a distant adoration 
in his courtship. Circumstances parted 
them. He went to the city to work. 

At twenty, he decided to marry. He was 

earning enough to support a wife, and he 

179 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

craved a home of his own. While he was 
visiting his parents, on a holiday, he was 
attracted by one of the young women of 
the neighborhood, who seemed, as he said, 
"a good healthy girl," and he married her. 
For three years they were quite happy. 
They had a child. There was no wild 
emotion of love between them, but he 
appreciated her good qualities and he was 
contented in the home she made for him. 

Then one night she revealed a secret to 
him. She was ill. She had been in a 
sanatoriimi for tuberculosis in her girlhood; 
she had been warned that the disease might 
recur; and of late she had found symptoms 
of its recurrence. The news depressed him 
horribly. He took her to a doctor, who 
confirmed her suspicions and ordered her 
to the coimtry. The boy's parents having 
died, he got rid of the people who had 
rented the old farm and he went there to 
live with his wife and child, *' commuting'* 
to his work in the city, night and morning. 

First he found himself tiring easily at his 
work. Then he began to stay in town at 
night instead of going home. After a time 
he was worried by the fact that he was 
spending on himself the money that he 
ought to give his wife. And suddenly he 
was aware, with horror, that he was thinking 

1 80 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

how much happier he would be if his wife 
should die. Overcome with a shocking con- 
viction of sin, he drove such thoughts from 
his mind. He redoubled his efforts to do 
the right thing by his wife, to go home at 
nights and to keep his money for her. He 
succeeded in correcting his thoughts and 
his conduct, but he began to have nausea 
and indigestion. His wife grew weaker. 
The doctor told him she was slowly dying, 
that she could not live more than three 
months. He remembered that his mother 
used to say that evil wishes could do actual 
harm to people. He asstired himself that 
this was nonsense, but he began to have 
insomnia, and his nights were made horrible 
with sleeplessness, remorse, an unconquer- 
able aversion to his wife, a hatred of his 
home, a disgust of himself, and the crushing 
depression of his own ill health and lack of 
energy. 

To cap the climax, he now met on a street 
car his boyhood sweetheart. She had not 
married, and she was alone in the world. 
Her parents had died and she was supporting 
herself by office work. He began to see her 
when he did not go home at nights. There 
was nothing between them except innocent 
affection, but he could no longer control 
his instinctive wish that he might be freed 

i8i 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

to marry her, and his revulsion at this guilt 
and his struggle against it reduced him to 
the final stages of insomnia, indigestion, and 
nervous collapse. 

"What he was now suffering," says Doctor 
X, ''was a physical disgust of illness in 
his home and a moral disgust of his evil 
thoughts. Both were being suppressed. 
Their total effect was being loaded upon the 
reaction of instinctive failiu'e, and the result 
was handled by the conscious mind as a 
form of disease. The predominating emo- 
tion was the subconscious horror of sin. 

"We worked out very clearly that his 
subconscious ideal of a wife was a girl like 
his mother, and that it was his subconscious 
ideal of conduct to love her as his father 
had loved his mother. It was evident that 
his present wife did not fulfill the one ideal 
any more than his conduct fulfilled the 
other. Both ideals were compulsive. Both 
aroused instinctive thoughts which were 
also compulsive and could not be controlled. 
But these thoughts need not be felt as 
moral guilt, provided they were not acted 
upon. He was at liberty to think as he 
pleased as long as he did his duty and harmed 
no one. 

"He agreed that he had been staying 

away from his home because of his aversion 

182 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

to a disease which his childhood training 
had taught him to loathe. He recognized 
that his failure to take his money home and 
his loss of interest in his work were both 
due to the fact that his ideal of a home having 
failed him, he had lost interest in the means 
by which he should support his household. 
He saw that his conduct had unconsciously 
betrayed the thoughts which his conscious 
loyalty was repressing. I showed him that 
his loss of interest in work and his wish 
for the death of his wife were only the 
instinctive attempt to escape from what he 
was forcing himself to do. I convinced 
him that there was no sin in having such 
thoughts so long as he kept them to himself 
and did his duty to his wife. 

'* Moreover, it was clear that his desire to 
marry his boyhood sweetheart was not bom 
merely of a wish to escape. It was due also 
to his subconscious desire to marry a woman 
like his mother. There was no sin in this 
so long as he did not express the desire and 
thereby cause any one unhappiness. He 
agreed. Being now free from the conviction 
of sin, he began to find relief also from the 
sense of moral inferiority and self -disgust. 
His insomnia passed. After a time we 
found that his nausea had disappeared. 
Then his indigestion began improving. 

183 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

''Recognizing the matter-of-factness of 
feelings that were instinctive, he began to 
take an interest in earning money to fulfill 
his duty to his wife, with the added sense 
of penance and reparation. He allowed 
himself the natiiral hope that if his wife died, 
he might marry his first sweetheart. He is 
now doing a good day's work comfortably 
and with better health. He is comparatively 
happy and his skin disease is cured.'* 

The whole case is an excellent example of 
how a man's conduct will unconsciously and 
uncontrollably fulfill an instinctive wish when 
that wish is most vigorously repressed, and 
of how easily the conduct can be controlled 
when the wish is allowed to drain off in 
consciousness. ''The remedy," as Doctor 
X puts it, "is not to grant a license to the 
instinctive impulse, and not to ' attempt 
wholly to dam it up, but to give it sufficient 
sluiceway in thought. Dominating impulses 
often dwindle to a trickle as soon as you 
make in consciousness a waste weir for the 
dam." 

And the moral of this whole matter of the 
influence of the subconscious mind on char- 
acter and conduct is the old moral, "Make 
it thy business to know thyself." You are 
being constantly affected, and very fre- 
quently betrayed, by a sort of hidden sprite 

184 



IN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 

within you that actuates you often as if you 
were a marionette. If you could find out 
what he is doing, you might either check 
him if he were misleading you or you might 
bring your conscious mind to aid him if he 
were guiding you aright. The difficulty is 
that you cannot see him by any effort of 
introspection, for he disguises himself against 
your conscious self-examination very cun- 
ningly. You can, however, go over the 
record of yotir past and see how he has led 
you. You can find him working in your 
emotional reactions — ^particularly when these 
are more violent than the occasion warrants 
— ^in your instinctive likes and dislikes, in 
your ideals and ambitions and unreasoned 
choices and beliefs. And best of all, you can 
catch and study him in your dreams. 

It is this business of interpreting your 
dreams that we must next consider. 

13 



CHAPTER VIII 

IN DREAMS 

THE Freudian interpretation of dreams is a 
bewilderingly complicated matter, about 
which there have been written a bewildering 
number of complicated books. To the or- 
dinary reader, the orthodox Freudian seems 
to be pursuing his dream divination through 
an intricate maze of sex symbolism, following 
it round and round with the pale frenzy of 
a monomaniac who has become rather dizzy, 
though he still remains determined. He is 
giddily difficult to follow, and he becomes 
increasingly unspeakable the farther he goes. 
Fortunately, Doctor X is not an orthodox 
Freudian. His interpretation of dreams is 
at once simpler and more printable. 

Let us take an example. 

One of his patients is a married woman 
who came to him with an apparent derange- 
ment of the heart which her family physician 
had diagnosed as perhaps due to goiter. He 
had referred her to Doctor X as a specialist 
in such diseases of the internal glands. 

i86 



IN DREAMS 

Doctor X found no goiter. He found 
nothing to account for the functional dis- 
turbance of the heart and the choking f eeHng 
of which she also complained. He learned, 
however, that she was often attacked by 
these symptoms at night in her sleep. He 
asked her whether she could recall any dream 
that had preceded her awakening to the 
distress of such symptoms. She recalled 
the following nightmare:. 

She had dreamed that she was leaving 
her girlhood home in Buffalo on a steam- 
boat. She was alone, and she was carrying 
an umbrella that seemed to her to be a 
prized gift from her mother. The umbrella 
slipped from her hand and fell overboard. 
Overwhelmed with a frantic sense of tragic 
loss, she plunged overboard herself, resolved 
to lose her life rather than lose her mother's 
gift. She sank. She was drowning. 

Her struggles awakened her. But she 
woke to a choking sense of fear and despair, 
with her heart beating madly; and both the 
depression and the palpitation continued 
all the next day, and the next. She felt as 
if some terrible disaster impended. On the 
third day, alarmed by the rapidity of her 
pulse, she consulted her family doctor and 
told him of the dream in which the symptoms 
had begun. He decided that the palpitation 

187 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

of the heart was due to a goiter and that the 
dream of drowning came from the difficulty 
in breathing caused by the heart disturbance. 

Doctor X concluded that this diagnosis put 
the cart before the horse. 

Disregarding the Freudian symbols in 
the dream, he said to her: *'I should judge 
from your nightmare that when you left 
the happiness of your childhood home you 
suffered a great loss. You have failed to 
repair that loss in spite of desperate efforts 
to do so, and youVe come to the point 
where the fear of never repairing it leads 
you to wish for death.'* 

She burst into tears. She confessed that 
what he had said was true. She was very 
unhappy. She had tried to conceal it from 
herself. She had never admitted it even to 
her mother. ''It would kill my mother if 
she knew how unhappy I am,'* she said. 
"I think of it as little as I can. I busy 
myself with war work and try to forget." 

What was the cause of this unhappiness? 

''I have never loved my husband/' she 
said, "and I have no child to love. Fm so 
unhappy I wish I could go to sleep and 
never wake again." 

Now, how did the nightmare picture this 
tragedy? 

Doctor X took the details of the dream 

i88 



IN DREAMS 

drama, one by one, and asked her to tell 
him what incident in her life each recalled. 

Leaving her childhood home on board a 
steamboat reminded her of her honeymoon 
trip by water. Her childhood had been 
most happy. She had been stampeded into 
marriage by the whirlwind courtship of a 
domineering army officer. She had not 
loved him wildly, but his many good qualities 
had convinced her that he would make a 
model husband. On her honeymoon she 
learned that he disliked children and was 
determined not to have any. 

What was the most priceless gift she had 
ever received from her mother? It was 
the gift of perfect love. As a romantic 
girl, she had daydreamed of giving such a 
love to her husband and her child, and of 
living in just such an atmosphere of affection 
as had filled her childhood home. It was 
a dream that could never be realized now. 

What great loss by water had she suffered? 
Some years after her marriage she had 
taken a fox terrier as a pet. She was 
ashamed to say it, but she had loved this 
little dog more than any one in her life 
except her mother. Her husband had told 
her that it was wicked to love an animal 
so inordinately. She felt that she was giving 
to the dog all the love that she might have 

189 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

lavished on her child. She used to confide 
her troubles to it, and it would listen to her 
with its head cocked on one side. She was 
sure it understood. Then, one day, it 
disappeared. At nightfall they found it 
still struggling feebly in the water at the 
bottom of a disused well. It was breathing 
when they rescued it, but it died in her 
arms. She broke down with an attack of 
nervous prostration, haunted by a picture 
of the little animal fighting for its life in 
the icy water and looking up for the help 
which it had never failed to get from her 
before. The effect on her was as tragic as 
if it were a child of hers that had drowned. 

When did she first have the wish to die? 
When the dog died. And she had often 
wished it since. Life was a hopeless fight. 
There was nothing to look forward to. She 
still had her mother's love, but her mother 
was growing old and feeble. She would 
soon be gone. It was a thought that had 
to be kept out of the mind. When she 
went to see her mother now the sight of 
her, aged and failing, brought nothing but 
pain instead of pleasure. 

The dream, then, had merely taken some 
of the stage properties of the tragedy of her 
waking day and used them in a little sym- 
bolic drama that condensed the sorrows of a 

190 



IN DREAMS 

lifetime. The emotions that were produced 
by the fictitious incidents of the dream 
were precisely the emotions that would have 
been felt if she had consciously reviewed the 
grievous incidents of her unhappy marriage. 
These incidents were being kept out of her 
conscious thought. The attempt to repress 
them had also forced them to assume the 
disguises under which they appeared in her 
dream. But though they were disguised, 
the emotions which they elicited were real 
emotions — ^the emotions that were being 
dammed up in her subconscious mind by 
her waking determination to think of her 
unhappiness as little as possible. 

''From my standpoint/* says Doctor X, 
''the dream merely provided a certain 
amount of needed emotional drainage. But 
the fact' that the bodily symptoms persisted 
after her awakening showed that the dammed- 
up emotions had risen to a point where 
they were dangerous to health. Here was 
a warning that unless the emotions were 
released from repression, there might be 
serious consequences to the patient, men- 
tally or physically.'* 

Accordingly, he advised her that she 
should go to her mother and unburden her 
troubles instead of trying to bear them 
alone. He prescribed, also, that she must 

191 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

accept her unhappiness, adjust herself to 
it, and cease living a false life of pretended 
contentment and secret grief. Having faced 
her losses, she could then consider what 
assets she had on the other side of her 
balance sheet to make life endurable. She 
had a sound body. She had youth. She 
had friends. Instead of continually grieving 
because she had missed the goal of her 
desire, she might attain a lesser goal of 
satisfied affection by bringing pleasure and 
happiness to others. 

She followed his advice, and she is now, 
as Doctor X says, /'well, and contented 
within the limits of a narrower world than 
the ideal one of her girlhood daydreams.** 

Let us take another example. 

A patient dreamed that he was in the 
barnyard of his boyhood home. An im- 
mense horse was pursuing him. He took 
refuge in the barn, but the horse broke 
down the doors. He fled in terror, and now 
his wife was with him. He saw before him 
a stone wall. If he could climb to the top 
of it, he woiild be safe. He could easily 
do it, if he would abandon his wife. He 
decided against that. By a desperate effort, 
he reached the top of the wall and dragged 
his wife up after him, but he had difficulty 
in maintaining his balance and he felt that 

192 



IN DREAMS 

he might fall at any moment. He awoke 
in great anguish of mind and with a feeling 
of vertigo that continued throughout the 
day. 

Doctor X said to him: **I should in- 
terpret this dream as meaning that you have 
been oppressed all your life by the sense of 
an inexorable force that might at any time 
destroy you. You have held your own by 
a narrow margin. There is always the fear 
that your margin of safety may disappear." 

He replied at once: *'That is true. And 
the force you speak of is the power of unjust 
authority." 

When the doctor asked him to ** associate" 
the disconnected details of his dream with 
incidents and memories of his life a com- 
plete series of symbols came to light. 

A horse suggested great strength to him. 
A big horse suggested his father, who was 
a huge man. The father was also a harsh 
and unjust man, and he had compelled the 
boy to work on the paternal farm at tasks 
that were beyond his boyish strength. This 
work was always associated in his memory 
with the big, rawboned farm horse with 
which he had plowed and cultivated. The 
work had not only injured his health; it 
had also prevented him from getting a 
proper education. He felt that unjust 

193 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

paternal authority had thus blighted his 
whole life. 

When he finally broke away from home 
he found employment under the govern- 
ment. He was holding this position when 
Roosevelt became President. Roosevelt was 
at that time his ideal. There was in his 
mind some association between Roosevelt 
and a powerful horse. On his way to vote 
for Roosevelt for a second term as President, 
he passed the doors of a fire-engine house. 
An alarm had evidently just been rung in, 
for the doors of the engine house suddenly 
flew open and a team of fire horses plunged 
out at him, just as the horse had plunged 
through the barn door in his dream. He 
barely escaped being trampled on. 

Soon after election President Roosevelt 
cut down the staff of employees in the 
department in which the patient was work- 
ing. He was reduced to a lower position 
on a smaller salary, and he just missed being 
thrown out of employment altogether. It 
was a great injustice to him. He had ever 
since considered Roosevelt as the embodi- 
ment of unjust authority. 

And, ever since, times had been hard for 
him. He had with difficulty paid for his 
home. He could have succeeded well enough 
by himself, but it was not easy to support 

194 



IN DREAMS 

a wife. He was a good workman, but he 
had no political influence, and it was pull, 
he said, not merit, that advanced a man in 
the government service. It was too late 
to go into any private enterprise. He was 
growing old, and always there was the fear 
that the next changes in his department 
would put him out of office and condemn 
him to a poverty-stricken old age. Worry 
had undermined his health, and he felt 
that he might break down any day. It was 
by a very small margin that he was holding 
his own against the menace of unjust 
authority. 

*'From this dream," says Doctor X, "we 
got an insight into the secret of the patient's 
whole problem. He was the victim of a 
subconscious feeling of revolt — a revolt first 
against his father's authority, and then 
against all analogous authority, against 
Roosevelt authority, against church author- 
ity, and even against the authority of 
society itself. He was maintaining an un- 
happy child's attitude toward life. He was 
the victim of a faulty adjustment to the 
necessary conditions of social existence. He 
was helped both in mind and body by getting 
him to recognize the unwisdom and un- 
reasonableness of his false emotional 
reactions." 

195 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

And here is a third example : 

A yoting woman, who had been married 
about five years, came to Doctor X with 
symptoms of throat trouble which it was 
supposed might be due to some affection 
of the thyroid gland. She described these 
symptoms as '*a sort of choking feeling/* 
Under his questions, she traced them back 
to their beginning in a nightmare. 

She had dreamed that she was in the 
kitchen of her home, at night, washing 
the dishes. She heard a noise at the out- 
side door. It opened slowly and a hand 
appeared, holding an electric flashlight. An 
unknown man in a black mask sprang into 
the room with a pistol in his hand. She 
screamed in terror, ran from the kitchen, 
and fell fainting on the stairs. She awoke 
in a state of panic with a choking in the 
throat which persisted and became chronic. 

Doctor X said, ''You are doing your 
duty as a wife, but you live in terror of 
something that threatens to disturb the peace 
of your married life." 

She was much embarrassed. ''That," 
she replied, "is something that I can't talk 
about to anyone." 

On a subsequent visit she admitted that 
this ''something" was a thought. "A 
thought," she said, "comes into my mind, 

196 



IN DREAMS 

and I have to fight it down. It's a wicked 
thought and I'm afraid of it. It's the 
thought of a boy I quarreled with before 
I married. I didn't realize that I loved 
him until too late. I only want to be a good 
wife and make my husband happy, but 
this boy comes continually into my mind." 

The flashlight suggested a flashlight which 
the boy had carried when he came to call 
on her, in the evening, at her country 
home. The pistol, too, reminded her of a 
pistol with which he had armed himself 
because there had been some hold-ups in 
the neighborhood at the time. The masked 
man — who was unknown to her in the 
dream — was the boy himself. *'It is a 
rule," says Doctor X, "that any unknown 
person in a dream is some one very well 
known to the conscious mind. The boy 
appeared as an outlaw because he represented 
the outlawed thought that was breaking into 
her mind and producing fear at each assault." 

Her ideal of wifely loyalty was so high 
that it would not permit her to have such 
thoughts of another man. The compulsive 
power of the thought came from her opposi- 
tion to it, which created a dammed-up 
energy that had no drainage. 

'* Admit to yourself that you like this 
boy," Doctor X advised her. ''Allow all 

197 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

thoughts of him to enter your mind freely. 
They will soon fade away. He was for a 
time a symbol of happiness to you, and your 
repression has fixed the idea at that level. 
Admit that life with him might have been 
romantic, and think about it without guilt. 
You have a good husband. You are living 
a good, wholesome life. You are interested 
in your home. Don't fight yourself. You 
are making yourself ill and unhappy." 

As a matter of fact, as soon as she took 
that mental attitude, the outlawed thought 
lost its compulsiveness. The dreams ceased 
and her throat symptoms disappeared. 
''Her thousrhts of the boy," says Doctor 
X, ''have become pleasant memories that 
do her no harm. Instead of fighting a 
secret sin, she smiles over a girlhood ro- 
mance of the past and accepts her present 
with a pride in her sense of fulfilled duty." 

And here is a fourth case: 

A patient, a married woman, was very 
much worried about her mental condition. 
The circumstances of her life were apparently 
happy. It was true that she had been 
miserable with her first husband, but she 
had divorced him, years before, and married 
a man to whom she was entirely devoted. 
She had had a child by her second marriage, 
and all was well with her. 

198 



IN DREAMS 

She dreamed that she returned home to 
find her baby girl lying in a darkened room, 
apparently dying. There was a small red 
mark, like the mark of a hypodermic needle, 
on the infant's neck. She felt that some 
one had attacked the baby in her absence. 
A dark, gypsy-looking woman came into the 
room, and on seeing her the mother screamed, 
with a shocking oath, *'Tll kill you!" At 
that, she woke in a state of frightened horror. 

**Now, Doctor," she said, "I have never 
sworn like that at anyone in my life, and 
I have never had such a feeling — to want 
to kill anyone. Does it mean that my mind 
is becoming affected? I feel as if it were." 

''No," he said. ''The dream is only the 
draining oflE of some very powerful emotion 
that you have repressed." 

"But," she objected, "I have no repres- 
sions whatever. I'm quite happy. Do you 
think it could mean that some evil is threat- 
ening my baby?" 

"Not at all," he said. "Your dream is 
too symbolic and personal for me to gen- 
eralize, but if you will dismiss the dream 
itself from yotir thoughts for a moment, 
and answer my questions, I think we can 
find out what it means. Tell me, who 
comes to your mind when I say 'a dark, 
gypsy-looking woman' ? " 

199 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

**My first husband's mother/' she replied. 
She added, significantly, **But then, he 
looked just like her." 

"A hypodermic needle?" 

" My first husband was an addict. That 
was what made my life with him unendur- 
able." 

''An injury to the neck?" 

''My own neck. My husband choked me 
in his frenzy. That was what decided me 
to leave him." 

"An innocent young girl?" 

"Myself. My husband married me, an 
ignorant and romantic young girl, and he 
destroyed all my illusions. He killed some- 
thing in me. Sometimes I felt I could have 
killed him for the way he dragged down my 
highest ideals." 

"I think you have there the secret of 
your dream," the doctor said. "Your hus- 
band's actions raised a murderous hatred 
in you, and your self-esteem repressed it as 
unworthy of your better self. For years 
this undrained hatred has been festering in 
you. You should recall, instead of for- 
getting, all those brutal scenes with him, 
and if necessary swear out any feelings that 
come back with the memory. In that way 
you'll get rid of them. Better a sulphurous 
atmosphere in your boudoir than a seething 

200 



IN DREAMS 

volcano of suppressed bitterness in your 
heart/' 

Now, it is evident that all these patients 
might have been saved much worry and 
ill health if they had understood the mech- 
anism and the functions of dreaming. A 
dream is a form of thinking. To most of 
us, thinking is that form of mental activity 
in which thought is used as a tool to solve 
problems — such problems as making in- 
come meet expenses, planning a business deal 
or a course of action, evaluating another's 
motives, or arranging a vacation. **This 
form of thinking, which we may call con- 
centration," Doctor X points out, '4s de- 
veloped largely by school education, where 
the child is trained to solve a problem in 
arithmetic instead of musing on a wished- 
for pleasure, such as swimming or playing 
baseball.'* But musing on a wished-for 
pleasure is also a form of thinking. We call 
it daydreaming. ' ' Most of us, ' ' says Doctor 
X, **have a contemptuous disrespect for 
daydreaming or reverie. It is, however, 
the most natural form of thinking. It comes 
nearest to expressing our real selves. Its 
most striking quality is the high degree 
of interest that it has for us, and this degree 
of interest indicates the strength of the 
instinctive desires by which such thinking 

14 20I 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

is always energized. Daydreaming is con- 
cerned with the realization in fancy of our 
dearest ideals and most instinctive wishes, 
which reality has frustrated. Daydreaming, 
however, is censored by our waking in- 
telligence, which keeps fancy within the 
limits of possibility. In the dream of sleep, 
intelligence ceases to censor fancy, and our 
wishes have their way. We may daydream 
of what we would do if we had a possible 
raise of salary. In the dream of sleep the 
raise of salary arrives — possible or impossible 
— ^and the dream proceeds to live up to it." 

The simplest dream, then, is the fulfill- 
ment of an instinctive wish that has been 
frustrated by reality. 

But dreaming has another function. Our 
instinctive wishes are not only frustrated 
by reality. They are also blocked, in our 
waking hours, by our codes of conduct, 
our consciences, our sense of what it is right 
or wrong to desire. Any interference with 
an instinctive impulse dams up energy, and 
any interference with instinctive thinking 
produces an anxiety which we feel as worry. 
''The common formula for the relief from 
worry," says Doctor X, ''is to 'forget it.' 
But I find that worry is always due to a 
fear of failure to reach an instinctive goal, 
and the instinctive impulse continues in 

202 



IN DREAMS 

spite of the forgetting. The unsatisfied 
instinct remains as an irritating form of 
energy somewhere in the mental life. The 
dream serves to drain this off. A recurring 
dream will cease as soon as the repressed 
emotion is allowed to enter the conscious 
mind freely. And I find that any incident 
having free entry into the waking thoughts 
rarely appears in dreams." 

It would seem, further, that the power 
which repressed the instinctive thought 
while we were awake still operates while we 
are asleep and compels the outlawed thought 
to disguise itself. *'The jilted suitor who 
forces himself to forget his inamorata," 
says Doctor X, ''never sees her face in his 
dreams, but he suffers in his dreams pre- 
cisely the emotions that he would feel if 
he allowed the recollection of her to enter 
his waking thoughts. The release of these 
repressed emotions has to be obtained in 
his dreams by adroit and hidden means. 
Hence the more powerful his repression is 
the more difficult it will be to understand 
his dream.'* 

The dream mind, of course, can think 
only in pictures. If you feel yourself 
threatened by some menace, the menace 
will appear in your dream as a masked 
man at the door, as a huge horse in the 

203 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

barnyard, or as some other object that is 
associated in your subconscious mind with 
the idea of a menace. It is perhaps the 
secret of the popular appeal of the moving 
picture that it conforms to this picture- 
thinking of the subconscious mind. And 
since the dream mind is the instinctive, 
animal mind — and the instincts, as we have 
seen, have starting signals that we call 
''symbols*' — it is natural that the dream 
pictures should so often prove to be symbols 
that are as old as art. 

The orthodox Freudian has done an enor- 
mous work of research in identifying 
these symbols. He has, as it were, taken 
the words of your dream dictionary, one 
by one, and traced them back to their 
roots and original meanings. But he has 
too often made the mistake of studying the 
words apart from their context, and he has 
made an erudite mystery out of sentences 
whose simple meaning is clear enough. 
Doctor X's method seems more sensible. 
He concerns himself more with the emo- 
tional contents of the dream than with the 
cryptic words in which the emotion expresses 
itseJf . He finds that the emotion is always 
evident and undisguised, because it is the 
purpose of the dream to release that emotion 
from repression. ''The real part of the 

204 



II 



IN DREAMS 

dream," he says, '*is the emotion. In in- 
terpreting a dream, the initial question to 
ask yourself is what were the emotions felt 
in the dream. The details of the dream 
may at first be disregarded. This is difficult 
for the dreamer himself to do when he is 
attempting self-analysis. He will discover 
that he is always interested in the details 
of the dream and gives little heed to the 
emotions.'* 

In our Puritan civilization, the commonest 
of all repressed emotions are the sex emo- 
tions. Repressions become involved with 
repressions in the subconscious mind, and 
the orthodox Freudian, being on the look- 
out for sex symbols, finds them in many 
a dream whose main theme is by no means 
sexual. For instance, all the four dreams 
which I have given above contain sex 
symbols that imply some suppression of 
sex emotions, but to interpret those dreams 
wholly in terms of sex would be to miss 
I their point. The Freudian interpretation 
of dreams is often dangerously wrong for 
that reason. 

'^ A dream is always egoistic," says Doctor 
X. ''It is always concerned with the 
dreamer as its central figure." But it has 
a confusing trick of splitting up the person- 
ality of the dreamer into his known qualities, 

205 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

which are shown as separate actors in the 
dream. If you have a violent temper, Hke 
yotir friend B, B himself is likely to 
appear in your dream as your *' angry 
self." A feminine dreamer who reproaches 
herself with having strong masculine charac- 
teristics will figure in her own dreams as a 
boy. Animals will often in dreams play 
the part of that self of the dreamer which 
he considers brutal or animal-like. For 
example, a dream enacts the struggle be- 
tween the dreamer and a tiger-cat. Associa- 
tion shows that the tiger sjmibolizes the 
dreamer's wild self, and the dream is a 
representation of a struggle that is actually 
going on between the dreamer's ideal self 
and certain tmbridled desires. 

One of Doctor X*s patients, a young man, 
dreamed frequently of a neglected dog whose 
pathetic condition moved him to excessive 
pity. He woke from these dreams in a 
state of depression that lasted throughout 
the day. He had a rather Spartan ideal 
of conduct and he was impatient of these 
moods in himself. He took life stoically 
and he was suffering no unhappiness of 
which he would complain. 

By association, Doctor X discovered that 
when this boy's mother died she left a 
little dog that was inconsolable. It would 

206 



IN DREAMS 

sit outside the door of her empty room for 
hours, watching for her, or waiting on the 
stairs as if it expected to hear her step. 
The son went to endless trouble to make 
this grieving pet comfortable. He had been 
known to leave a week-end party and hurry 
home to make sure that the servants were not 
neglecting it. He found it dead, one morning, 
at the door of his mother's empty bedroom, 
and this incident moved him extremely. 

Further association recalled a picture of 
himself as a very small boy sitting on the 
stairs outside his mother's room, with his 
shoes on the step beside him, waiting for 
her forgiveness for some childish misbe- 
havior, before he could go out to play. It 
became apparent that after his mother's 
death he had drained off his own grief and 
self-pity by his devoted care of her pet. 
The dog now figured in his dreams as his 
neglected self. He was evidently repressing 
an excessive self-pity. He confessed, re- 
luctantly, that he was in love with a young 
woman who often wounded him by her 
neglect. Examination showed that her 
neglect was largely imaginary — a fiction of 
his own unconscious desire to seek occasion 
for self-pity. ''The analysis of his dream," 
says Doctor X, "led to an adjustment that 
paved the way to a happy marriage." 

207 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

That, of course, is to the layman the 
chief value of dream analysis as Doctor X 
practices it: he uncovers the secret springs 
of ill health and unhappiness in his patients 
and indicates the way in which they may 
be cured. As the cure proceeds, it is 
possible to watch the patient's dreams and 
follow his progress. His subconscious mind, 
unknown to him, reports its objections in 
his dreams or indicates its acquiescence, and 
the doctor can check up his prescriptions 
by means of these reports. In cases of 
mental disorder, the dreams infallibly in- 
dicate the approach of insanity, but that 
is not a matter to be handled in such a 
book as this. And there are many other 
professional aspects of dream analysis which 
would be out of place here. Let me con- 
clude with some typical dreams that are 
significant as indicating unconscious trends 
common to great nimibers of modern Ameri- 
cans and little understood by them. 

A famous surgeon and his sister, New 
Englanders of culture and intelligence, both 
had the same recurring dream. They im- 
agined that they were taking a college 
examination. When the examination papers 
were handed out they foimd that the subject 
was one they had neglected to study. They 
were faced by the certainty of complete 

208 



IN DREAMS 

failiire. It was too late to study the subject, 
and it was impossible to fake answers to 
the questions. They were baffled. And 
they were enraged at their own neglect and 
lack of foresight. These feelings were over- 
whelmingly intense. 

On hearing this dream, Doctor X said 
to the surgeon, ''Obviously, this means 
that you are faced by some problem that 
completely baffles you — a problem for which 
all your study and experience offers no 
solution — and you are trying not to think 
about it." 

What was that problem? 

The stirgeon indicated it with reluctance. 
He had grown up in an atmosphere of the 
strictest Puritanism. In later years he had 
lost all belief in the tenets of the Puritan 
faith. He had accepted as his religion a 
sort of intellectual liberalism in which 
reason was supreme. But he was baffled 
by the problem of eternity. ''Nothing that 
I know,'* he said, "seems to give me the 
assurance of everlasting life that I crave." 
His sister was in the same case, confronted 
by the same mystery. Subconsciously, they 
both felt themselves unready for the great 
examination. Their suppressed anxiety 
showed in their common dream. 

"Otir fear of death," says Doctor X, 
209 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

*'is really a fear of eternity. The subcon- 
scious mind has no fear of death, because 
it admits no cessation of its existence and 
cannot picture any. It shows, however, a 
very keen interest in the evil which may 
befall it after death. In this respect, it 
acts exactly like the instinctive mind of the 
most primitive people. And so many of 
us have lost faith in the religions which 
protected us from this fear that the dread 
of death is a frequent cause of our 
anxiety dreams." 

One of his patients is a lady, happy in a 
second marriage and devoted to her ten- 
year-old son, named Norman. She had 
been for some time under treatment for 
heart disease and had suffered much with 
palpitations of the heart. Doctor X found 
her heart organically perfect, but he learned 
that she frequently woke at night with a 
very rapid heartbeat and a suiBEocating 
sense of imminent heart failure. He asked 
her to recall some dream from which she 
had wakened in this condition. She re- 
called the following nightmare: 

''I was crossing a Httle stream in the 
country. Norman and I were crossing it 
together on a rotten log that was suspended 
at each end by a rusted wire. Norman 
jumped up and down on the log and it 

2IO 



IN DREAMS 

began to give way. I said: * Norman, I 
have known this log since childhood, and it 
is rotten clean through. You must be 
careful.' Norman continued to rock the 
log. I felt it giving way. As we were 
about to fall into the dark water, I awoke 
screaming with terror.'* 

This dream was so typical that Doctor 
X said, flatly, ''You are afraid of death 
and the hereafter." 

''Nonsense!" she replied. "I'm not a 
bit afraid of death. It has no terrors 
whatever for me. I'm a good churchwoman." 

But when he asked her to tell him what 
incidents of her life were recalled by as- 
sociation with the separate objects in her 
dream a most enlightening series of mem- 
ories was discovered. 

When he asked her what happening was 
suggested by the word "water" she replied: 
"I have always had a fear of water. The 
first fright I recall was due to falling out 
of a boat when I was about four years old. 
My father rescued me, but I thought I was 
going to drown." 

And when he asked her what came to 
her with the thought of "a country stream" 
she answered: "The stream near my home. 
I crossed it when I ran for father the day 
brother died. It was my first experience 

211 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

with death. I was only five. Brother was 
taken sick at ten o^clock and at fotir he 
was dead. They laid him out in a white 
shroud. One night, some weeks later, at 
dusk, I saw him all in white. I ran scream- 
ing to mother. She said it was all nonsense, 
but I knew I had seen him. I was afraid 
to go out at night after that. The next 
spring my father died. I wotdd not go 
into the house until after the funeral." 

The doctor said: **The log which pro- 
tects you in your dream from the fear of 
drowning is probably something that has 
served from childhood to protect you from 
the fear of eternity. The only protection 
against the fear of eternity is religion. 
What about your religion? " 

''I was brought up a Catholic," she 
replied, ''but I have left that church. I 
married at seventeen and my husband drew 
me away to his faith." 

Her son Norman was about to be 
operated on, and she was afraid that he 
might die. He did not belong to any 
church. 

Another common kind of dream, charac- 
teristic of our day and age, is typified by 
the following specimen: 

The dreamer stands beside a pool. 
Terraced steps descend to the basin below. 

212 



IN DREAMS 

The pool has a border of tropical plants 
and the whole setting is Eastern and exotic. 
A moving object of some sort is dimly 
visible in the depths of the water. The 
dreamer picks up something to throw at 
it. His friends beg him not to do it. He 
persists. He throws at the creature in the 
pool, and at once he has the feeling that he 
has done wrong. Out of the water there 
springs a tigress that leaps up the marble 
steps toward him. He flees in terror. The 
tigress gains on him. He turns to defend 
himself, and the tigress has become an 
infuriated woman. He awakens, still fright- 
ened and trembling. 

'*The symbolism here is quite plain,** 
says Doctor X, '*and the subsequent 'as- 
sociation* merely verified it. We are deal- 
ing with fear of woman. Such a fear seems 
ridiculous as a factor in repression, but I 
find it a factor of great and imrecognized 
importance in our civilization. Most men 
scoff at it — as this patient did — ^because a 
man must scoff at it in order to keep up 
his fiction that he is the lord of creation. 
Like other fears which go back deep into 
our racial past, the fear of woman is so 
strongly repressed that its only expression 
is in subconscious thinking and motivation. 

** Man's fear of woman is embodied in 
213 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

myth, legend, fairy tale, and folklore. In- 
fatuation for a woman places a man in a 
position of defenselessness. The stories of 
Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, and 
Antony and Cleopatra portray the danger. 
Listen to a group of men in a club: *Yes, 
Bill was all right till he fell for So-and-so. 
That was his ruin.' Man is afraid of an 
inner weakness by which he may be enslaved. ' ' 

His fear shows itself in many odd, un- 
conscious ways. The film * Vampires" of 
the American movies have proved unpopular. 
The most popular woman stars are those 
who are most ing6nue and sexless. This is 
true also of the American stage. Much of 
the popular opposition to woman suffrage 
is obviously inspired by fear of woman. 
The so-called ^'war between the sexes'* is 
an expression of the same emotion. Repress- 
ing and refusing to acknowledge their fear, 
men give it the power by which it moves 
them to those acts of cruelty and injustice 
that come of fear. 

Doctor X sums up all these problems in 
this way: '* Emotions must be regarded 
as healthful currents of natural force that 
should be used to furnish energy for in- 
dividual expression and collective service. 
When emotions are so regarded life assumes 
a new meaning and the individual develops 

214 



IN DREAMS 

new powers. As things are now, to be 
emotional is to be considered weak, senti- 
mental, or sinful. Pauline self-repression 
is the ideal on the one hand, and hypocrisy 
and license the result on the other. Both 
roads lead to a selfishness that defeats the 
collective ideal of nature and impairs the 
success of our civilization, which is itself 
the expression of the collective ideal." 



CHAPTER IX 

IN RELIGION 

'* T FIND that subconscious health cannot 
1 be obtained in a patient who has lost 
his faith in immortality/* says Doctor X. 
''Agnosticism, in my experience, is a mental 
concept only; there is no such thing as 
emotional agnosticism. The subconscious 
mind Is basically as religious as the mind of 
the most primitive people. It has what we 
may almost call a religious instinct. You 
cannot achieve a happy and successful life 
unless you find some way to release that in- 
stinct to happy and successful fulfillment." 
This is a sufficiently astounding statement 
to come from a modem man of science. 
What does it mean? 

We have already pointed out, in an earlier 
chapter, that when the child outgrows his 
period of cradled omnipotence and begins 
to crawl and to learn to walk, he finds that 
he needs constant protection and support. 
He looks to his parent for aid, as to a higher 
power, and the parent consequently becomes 

216 



IN RELIGION 

a sort of supernatural being to him, aroid 
the dangers and uncertainties of his first 
steps in the world. He is dependent on a 
higher power, and his dependence promotes 
an inclination of the subconscious mind that 
commonly shows as a religious instinct. 
That instinct may be developed either 
happily or tmhappily by education and ex- 
perience. It cannot be eradicated by any 
skeptical conviction of the conscious mind. 
And the failure to direct its impulse to a 
prosperous issue is one of the notable 
disasters of our civilization. 

What is blocking us? 

According to Doctor X, we are being 
blocked by faulty education, organized igno- 
rance, the inherited errors of our forefathers, 
a bad tradition, and an evil use of it. 

It is easier to find the image of the parent 
as a god in the subconscious mind of the 
race than in the subconscious mind of the 
child, because the image alters in the child's 
mind nowadays at an earlier period than 
conscious memory can recall. Doctor X 
has one patient, a young woman with a 
religious complex, whose father was a quer- 
ulous invalid, irritable and exacting; he 
ruled over her young life, from an armchair, 
repressing her natural self-assertion with 
the stem admonition that disobedience to 
15 ai7 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

him was a sin; and she clearly remembers 
her first conception of God, in an armchair, 
watching her as her father watched. Such 
memories are rare. But in the subconscious 
mind of the race — ^as it expresses itself in 
primitive religions and hero myths — the 
working of the instinct has long been 
evident and recognized. It shows in its 
simplest form in early ancestor worship. 
It operates in the Greek legends of those 
dead tribal heroes who were seen as stars 
above their people; and in the belief of the 
Romans that their emperors, after death, 
became protecting gods; and so down to 
the almost modem tenet of the divine right 
of kings. The primitive devotee stretches 
out his arms to heaven, as a child holds out 
his arms to his parent. God is the heavenly 
Father. ''Pope" is a form of "papa." 
Priests are called ''fathers"; and the word 
"priest" itself is from the Greek word for 
"elder." Even the Tsar was "the Little 
Father," and we have our own "Father of His 
Country" as our national hero, and Lincoln 
was "Father Abraham" — ^for this instinct 
operates in hero worship as in religion. 

In ancient times, the father had the 
power of life and death over his children. 
The primitive religions were almost wholly 
religions of fear. A jealous and angry god 

218 



IN RELIGION 

punished his children with ill health, ca- 
lamity, earthquake, bad weather, insect pests, 
defeat in war, and all misfortune. The 
relation to the god and the relation to the 
parent were almost equally fearful. Now 
this sort of fear is a vile depressant, and 
the tradition of fear of God and fear of the 
parent is the "bad tradition" which Doctor 
X deplores. 

*'We know,*' he says, **that the feelings 
of strength and pleasure in the body are 
maintained by certain fluids called the 
endocrine secretions, which are poured into 
the system by the effect of the emotions. 
The pain feelings or the weak feelings in the 
body result from the withholding of these 
secretions or from the release of a weakening 
secretion poured out in the same way. The 
elation of success produces strength and 
pleasure in the body by causing chemical 
changes in the bodily secretions. The de- 
spair of failure causes equally strong effects 
of the opposite kind. Hope of success and 
success itself cause strength. Anticipation 
of failure and failure itself cause weakness. 
I am not speaking now of conscious mental 
processes. I mean that, in response to 
instinctive symbols and independent of in- 
telligence, the body is chemically strength- 
ened or weakened in success or failure. 

219 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

*'Fear is the anticipation of failure, as 
hope is the hallucination of success. The 
failure to attain the goal of 'good' produces 
that fear reaction which we call 'guilt/ and 
chemically affects the body, and causes 
intolerable discomfort. To the child, to be 
good is to obey the parental god, whether 
it be a divine parent or a parent projected 
into the sky. To make the emotion of this 
instinct so largely an emotion of fear is 
dangerous to the health and happiness of 
the child, and it is almost certain, in his 
later years, subconsciously to cramp his 
energy and block his success." 

It would seem, then, that it is practically 
a necessity of the subconscious mind that 
it should have some higher power on which 
to depend; and those who have lost their 
belief in a personal God will not be able to 
free themselves to the happiest development 
of their energies until they can find some 
substitute — some spiritual or moral law, if 
you please — ^in which they can place their 
trust and to which they may do their 
fealty. For those who, more happily, have 
not lost their belief in a parental God the 
requisite of happiness is a God of love and 
kindliness; and it is the forttmate child 
whose parents teach and practice the re- 
ligion of love, for he will probably grow up 

220 



IN RELIGION 

without that inheritance of inescapable fear 
which is the unconscious curse of so much 
of our modem piety. 

This, however, is by no means the whole 
of the problem. There is still the curse of 
the evil self to be lifted. That possession 
begins, in the child, with the first revolt of 
the instinct of self-assertion, which is usually 
disobedience to the parent; and disobedience 
being concealed because of the fear of 
punishment, the child is afficted with the 
sense of secret guilt. Here, possibly, is the 
origin of the idea of the evil self among 
primitive peoples, too, but with them, as 
with the growing child, it is all confused 
with the idea of the sex self — perhaps 
because the instinct of sex is nature's lever 
for breaking the child away from the parent, 
in order to establish a new family; and the 
revolt of sex is consequently the revolt 
against the parent, and, therefore, the source 
of *' original sin.*' 

This is where Doctor X's complaint of 
"faulty education" begins. The child is 
taught that to disobey his parents is a sin, 
and the first stirrings of his instinct of self- 
assertion are thereby marked as sinful — as 
the stirrings of his evil self. His first 
instinctive curiosity about sex is similarly 
branded, and his sex self becomes part of 

221 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

his evil self. The Evil Self is then accepted 
as a sort of inner devil that is at war with 
his ideal self — his ideal self being the 
obedient child self that is acceptable to his 
parents and to his parental God. (Out of 
this conception of his ideal self arises what 
Doctor X calls ''the Hero Wish/' which 
becomes the unconscious and compulsive 
ideal of life.) 

"Of all phases of the evil self, '*says 
Doctor X, "the most destructive is the sex 
self when faiilty education has made it the 
enemy of the Hero Wish, the child ideal. 
The reaction to the evil sex self of child- 
hood, when well established, remains a per- 
sonal devil throughout life, not only de- 
stroying all possibility of realizing the Hero 
Wish, but continually endangering the hope 
of future life and happiness. What is this 
faulty education that creates the demon of 
the sex self? 

"The first evidence of sex curiosity in the 
child usually fills the parent with a horror 
and shame mdescribable. No pimishment, 
no threat, no picture of divine wrath is too 
terrible to be used to frighten the child 
away from the devices of sexual self -power. 
The only reasonable explanation is that the 
memory of the parent's own struggles with 
evil is still so vivid that he relives his own 

222 



IN RELIGION 

shame and is overwhelmed by the horror 
of it. The child has the brand of an in- 
effaceable vileness indelibly burned upon 
an instinct that is to appear again and again. 
This sense of vileness is refelt whenever the 
instinct moves, and the yielding to tempta- 
tion leaves a sense of guilt and remorse 
bitter beyond anything else in life. 

"The boy reacts first to guilt in instances 
of sex curiosity; then to the fear of irre- 
mediable injury derived from the misinter- 
pretation of certain natural ftmctions of 
puberty; and then to remorse at the in- 
trusion of forbidden thoughts. He ends by 
accepting a false belief of imperfection as 
the pimishment for sin. The sex instinct 
becomes so marked with a stigma of vileness 
that with difficulty can it be ennobled to 
serve the purposes of mating. A scar is 
left on self. 

''The girl follows the same path, which 
leads to the investment of the periodical 
function with shame, instead of pride, and 
to the abolition of the local pleasure values 
which make mutual love magnetic. Love 
relations become almost asexual and mar- 
riage is abhorrent. Thoughts that are ren- 
dered distorted and terrifying by repression 
keep alive the sense of guilt and remorse. 
The sex instinct is never so feeble but that, 

223 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

when repressed, it can force into the mind 
thoughts from which the child recoils with 
shame and guilt. A moment's consideration 
should convince anyone that nature never 
intended to ban with guilt the function upon 
which the existence of the race depends. 
The guilt of sex is a human fallacy. 

"The efforts of the youth to overcome, 
conceal, and outgrow this terrible evil self 
of sex produce most of the aberrations of 
conduct in adolescence. Here is the cause 
of adolescent conversion to religion, of 
adolescent asceticism, of all the nervous 
breakdowns of youth, and of most of the 
failures to maximate the ego. The posses- 
sion of an evil self of sex, continually 
flooding the mind with forbidden thoughts, 
is a complete bar to the hope of the Hero 
Wish. 

'*0q the other hand, if the child Is left 
alone, nature replaces one sex device with 
another without injury. The facts of the 
creation of life are explained and the phys- 
iology of the functions of puberty are 
elucidated with pride. Sex thoughts com- 
ing into the mind with a knowledge of their 
true value lose their sinfulness. The erotic 
thoughts and dreams of puberty are ex- 
plained as foreshadowing the supreme goal 

of life, mating and marriage. The girl comes 

224 



IN RELIGION 

to treasure her impulse as valuable energy 
to be conserved in order to realize an ideal. 
The evil self completely disappears and is 
replaced by the biological self of mother 
craving, the crown of womanhood. 

'*Many a woman is prevented from gain- 
ing pride in self-expression because of the 
unforgetable memory of the impurity of an 
evil self which may overwhelm her at any 
time of relaxed vigilance. Always, in dreams, 
this evil self appears in a forbidding role, 
from which the dreamer flees in terror. 
The most hopeful feature of lifting the ban 
from the sex self and allowing the person 
to think any thought that is biologically 
true is the disappearance of temptation. 
Any lustful thought, when told that it is 
but the biological craving for a child, to be 
fulfilled in an appropriate manner at an 
accepted time, readily accedes to the sugges- 
tion. The release of the personality from 
the millstone of guilt permits the use of 
energies in higher forms of activity.'' 

The Freudians have tried to remove the 

curse on the evil self by accepting it as the 

real self and by attributing its sinful aspects 

to man's false judgment of its meaning. 

They have tried to compose the old ''conflict 

between good and evil" by calling the evil 

good and by obtaining absolution for the 

225 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

evil by the correction of false opinion. 
They have assumed that the unconscious, 
composed of brute impulses, is the com- 
pelling force in life, and that it is re- 
pressed because it is intolerable to conscious 
thought. "These seem to me to be half- 
truths," says Doctor X. "The ego in 
animals corresponds loosely to the Freudian 
unconscious, but the primal brute cravings 
of any animal are molded to agree with a 
standard of conduct common to that par- 
ticular species of animal — so that conflict 
and repression occur in the animal world 
where no conscious thought is operating. 
The animal ego and the animal parent 
customs are in conflict, and by a process of 
imitating the parent a standardization of 
conduct is obtained. Human conduct is 
similarly standardized. Brute cravings in 
the child come to conform first with a 
standard of parental conduct. This stand- 
ard undergoes an alteration to meet the 
demands of the playground. It alters 
further in the reactions of romantic love and 
marriage and in the support of self and 
family. Imitation of a model, trial and 
error and the resulting compromises, produce 
the final character. 

"Moreover,'* says Doctor X, "my ex- 
perience fails to confirm the belief that the 

226 



IN RELIGION 

so-called Freudian Wish is the strongest 
force in life. In spite of all explanations to 
the contrary, there is no doubt that Freud 
considers the sex instinct the prime motive 
force in his theory of energy. Animal 
psychology shows that any instinct, when 
satisfied, ceases to act as a driving force. 
This fact — which is an admitted fact — re- 
duces sex impulsion to an intermittent and 
inconstant force. The only continually 
acting force is that inexorable urge which 
has been called the 'will to power,* the *61an 
vital,' and so forth. It is an innate craving 
for power which has marked man's emergence 
from the purely brute phase of life. Its 
mental expression is the Hero Wish. Sex 
domination is only one phase of it. 

''The Hero Wish is immemorial and world 
old. Mythology, folklore, fairy tales are 
full of it. In its blind beginning it is 
merely an impulsion to raise self to its 
highest power. But, in accord with the 
biological law of imitation, it follows a 
definite path to expression. This path 
begins as the path of the parental model — 
the girl to reproduce the mother, the boy 
the father. Its goal becomes a subconscious 
goal, the goal of the ideal; and the energy 
of the Hero Wish is restrained to the channel 
of the ideal. I have never come in contact 

227 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

with an adiilt problem which did not resolve 
itself into a failure to realize an ideal. 
Hence, the greatest need of modem re- 
ligion and morality seems to me to be the 
need to establish true ideals that are bio- 
logically attainable. We need more knowl- 
edge of ourselves. We need to create 
ideals that we can fulfill, and we need to 
inventory our real assets with pride. As 
it is, we create false ideals and we discard 
our real assets as liabilities. The true 
solution of life is to register our biological 
impulses at their real values as forms of 
djmamic energy, and to refine them so as 
to create the fullest self-expression while 
producing the fullest collective servicejto 
family, community, nation, and race.'* 

As philosophical pronoimcements, these 
dicta are important enough. But they are 
much more important as forming a regimen 
of health and a code of conduct. Here is 
a patient, a despondent yoimg woman, who 
is trying to earn her living without ambition, 
without energy, without friends. She is 
solitary. She is imwell. She is convinced 
that her ill health imfits her for marriage. 
She is convinced also that it makes success 
impossible for her. She is in despair. In 
talking with her about herself, the doctor is 
struck by "certain practices of renimciation 

228 



IN RELIGION 

which axe tmbiological" — ^instead of using 
her wages for self -adornment, self -education, 
and other forms of maximating the ego, 
she is spending all her earnings on her 
mother and her sister. An analysis of her 
dreams shows that her ill health is the 
physical reaction to a subconscious self- 
disgust, and this disgust traces back to the 
fact that as a child she hated her mother. 
It is true that she hated her mother quite 
justifiably in return for her mother*s cruelty; 
nevertheless, she feels the hatred as an 
emanation of her evil self; and all her acts 
of rentmciation are unconscious attempts to 
expiate her guilt. Similarly she is uncon- 
sciously accepting her ill health as a punish- 
ment of the evil self, and her fear and 
disgust of this inner devil are blocking her 
self-expression and her success. Deep in 
her mind, the doctor finds that her im- 
conscious wish is to have beautiful things, 
to have friends, to be loved, to have children. 
He releases her to health and happiness by 
rehabilitating her instinctive self, absolving 
it of guilt in her mind, and freeing her to 
the conscious fulfillment of her repressed 
ideals. 

Here is another patient, a young man of 
twenty, who came to Doctor X suffering 

with palpitation of the heart and extreme 

229 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

nervousness. He was employed as a clerk 
in an engineer's office; he was ambitious 
to become an engineer, worked overtime, 
studied diligently and attended night school. 
But ill health was checking him, and he was 
devoting hours of worry and all sorts of 
anxious efforts to regaining his health by 
means of diet, exercise, and medicine. 

"His apparent problem,'' says Doctor X, 
'*was his failure to succeed because of ill 
health. Analysis showed that his real 
problem — of which he was quite unaware — 
was his struggle with his evil self. In his 
boyhood, this evil self had given rise to 
evil thoughts, and these had produced 
habits which — as he had read and believed 
— ^permanently impaired mind and body. 
That was a lie, but his acceptance of it 
filled him with an instinctive fear that 
showed as nervousness and palpitation, and 
these in turn were accepted as evidences of 
physical and mental ruin. 

"He fell in love, but he was held back 
from marriage by his conviction that he was 
a physical wreck. His anxiety took the 
form of overwork and an overzealous at- 
tempt to regain his vigor. Both increased 
his ill health. He was rejected for life 
insurance. When the war broke out he 
was rejected by the training camp. These 

230 



IN RELIGION 

disasters finished him. He was now scarcely 
able to do his day's work, and he foresaw 
that he would soon be rejected by his 
employer. Could any cycle of defeat be 
more complete?'* 

The doctor's analysis showed that the 
patient had misinterpreted biological facts. 
The evil self was not an evil self, but a 
natural instinct branded with guilt. *'No 
real harm had been done his health. More 
harm had been done by his anxious efforts 
to get well. As soon as the cause of his 
fear was dissipated, the palpitation and the 
hypertension disappeared. He saw that he 
could realize his ideal. He no longer hesi- 
tated to become engaged. He left the 
tight rope on which he had been balancing, 
and he foimd that on solid groimd his re- 
leased energy was sufficient to do his work 
with. As his health improved, he obtained 
admission to the aviation service. He wrote 
me, from an aviation camp, a letter full of 
strength and confidence. Fear of a demon 
that was ruining his health had done all the 
damage." 

I might fill a volimie with reports of 
such cases as these from Doctor X's practice; 
for this conflict with the evil self is an 
incredibly common cause of ill health and 
tmhappiness. Let me add only one more — 

231 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

a case that hallucinates the evil self as a 
personal devil, after the manner of our 
Puritan ancestors. 

A boy of eight years old was brought by 
his parents to Doctor X, suffering supposedly 
with some sort of obscure nervous trouble. 
His father was a minister, and the boy had 
been strictly trained in the way that he 
should go. Unfortimately, he did not go 
in it. For one thing, he frequently ran 
away from home, and no punishment on 
his return seemed to deter him. After gain- 
ing his confidence, Doctor X learned that 
he did not nm away volimtarily; the devil 
made him. He had seen the devil several 
times, at night. He was sure it was not a 
dream. He described Satan's appearance 
vividly — ^though conventionally. The devil 
was stronger than he, and he had to obey 
if the devil told him to do a thing. He ran 
away, the last time, because when he got 
up in the morning he put his shoes on the 
wrong feet, and then he knew that the devil 
had him. It was a sign. Useless to resist! 
He ran off to a neighboring military camp 
and himg arotmd there all day. Of course 
he was whipped when he rettimed home. 
He felt that there was no justice in punish- 
ing him for a thing he could not help. Still — 

'*It's a real relief," says Doctor X, "to 
232 



IN RELIGION 

put the blame on the devil and absolve 
yourself of guilt. When Luther threw his 
inkpot at Satan he relieved himself more 
than if he had pounded himself on the 
head with it. The Eskimos of Labrador be- 
lieve that 'each person is attended by a 
special guardian who is malignant in char- 
acter, ever ready to seize upon the least 
occasion to work harm upon the individual 
whom it accompanies.' The medieval ^Church 
had a whole hierarchy of demons to accoimt 
for the temptation of the evil self. It is a 
workable device, but a very dangerous one. 
My young patient will outgrow his devil — 
he is not abnormal — but he will always have 
an unconscious stratum of fear in his life.'' 

Along with this imnecessary evil self of 
childhood, a horde of unnecessary sins are 
created — disobedience, anger, jealousy, self- 
ishness, self-conceit, pride, vanity, imper- 
tinence, and so forth. These sins are ex- 
pressions of the child's instinct of self- 
assertion, which is the mainspring of his 
whole life. Expressions of the coimter- 
vailing instinct of self-abasement are praised 
as virtues — humility, unselfishness, obe- 
dience, meekness, reverence for his elders 
and the general feeling of inferiority that 
comes with a broken mainspring. The 
child, with his sex instinct also marked as 
16 233 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

evil, is thus as nearly as possible predestined 
to unhappiness, ill health, and failure by 
the powerful influences of bad religious 
training and faulty education. 

"A man needs to accept himself," says 
Doctor X, **as a work of God, or the First 
Cause, or what you will, and to take himself 
with all the respect and admiration that he 
takes any other great work of nature. He 
is in the class with a great waterfall, a deep 
vein of ore, a reservoir of natural gas, a 
rich oil well. He is not only an admirable 
work of nature, but all his weaknesses and 
foibles, all his virtues and his powers, are 
equally the result of the workings of natural 
laws. These laws deserve his admiration 
as much as the law of gravitation deserves 
it. And they should be observed not merely 
with admiration, but with the desire to 
learn them. Man is not a hit-or-miss 
product. His weaknesses are not the result 
of original sin, nor his failures the result of 
ill luck; they are both the predictable out- 
come of discoverable laws. 

**The subconscious mind is the true think- 
ing mind. It acts without fear and without 
failure upon whatever it perceives as the 
truth. It acts truly, because it acts in 
accord with instincts that are compulsively 
formed by nature to register the truth as 

234 



IN RELIGION 

the truth is interpreted by the automatic 
receptors of the senses and by the memory 
images of these receptors. The instincts 
register in emotions which are rigidly pro- 
duced by this subconscious mind in accord 
with its perceptions. For instance, the 
subconscious registers aversion to a certain 
person — a. parent, perhaps — ^and the reaction 
of hate results without any regard to your 
intellectual belief that it is wicked to hate. 
The more blank of hate you make your 
intellect by repressing the emotion the 
more necessity you will have of handling a 
hate— a * grouch' — of unknown origin. The 
less conscious you are of the true origin 
of this hate the more liable you are to vent 
it on innocent persons. An instinctive emo- 
tion, once formed, must have an outlet and 
will get it. In losing the ability to regulate 
conduct in accord with emotion, you have 
lost control of life. Conduct can always 
be regulated in accord with convention, if 
you know what force you are trying to 
regulate. But when you attempt to regu- 
late conduct by regulating thought you 
only change the direction of conduct with- 
out improving the conduct in the least." 

This is the failure of much of our modem 
religion; it attempts to regulate conduct by 
regulating instinctive thought. Such thought 

235 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

is compulsive and should be free. It can 
be prevented from expressing itself in con- 
duct if it is felt freely and recognizably. It 
inevitably gets into conduct if it is repressed 
from conscious thought. 

"I had a relative,*' says Doctor X, "who 
lived on a farm near Buffalo. It was a 
good farm and he liked to live there. • It 
had only one drawback. He wanted an 
artesian well of deep, sweet water and he did 
not seem to be able to get it. ' He had an 
old-fashioned well about a htmdred feet 
from his front door, but this did not satisfy 
him; and whenever he bored for an artesian 
well he struck water that had a bad taste 
and a worse smell. That annoyed him 
beyond endurance. It made his whole 
estate defective. It spoiled his happiness. 
Finally, in a rage, he started to drill goodness 
into his well by boring to the center of the 
earth, if necessary. His drill was suddenly 
blown out by a stream of natural gas. He 
lived, thereafter, in luxury.'* 

According to Doctor X, our religions and 
our systems of morality are behaving to- 
ward the subconscious facts of life as his 
relative behaved toward the taste and odor 
of gas in his well. And not until we learn 
what that gas is, and free it to its proper 
uses, shall we be able to add to our lives 

236 



IN RELIGION 

the success and happiness that come of 
understanding the powers of our natures 
and drawing on the reservoirs of those 
powers. 

The greatest of our powers is that un- 
conscious ideal and aspiration which takes 
the form of the Hero Wish. It begins, 
perhaps, as pure selfishness and the desire 
for egoistic domination, but it is soon 
molded to more imselfishness by the desire 
for the parent's affection and approval, the 
approval of the parental God, the approval 
of playmates. At adolescence, it takes on 
forms of self-sacrifice and fulfills the ethics 
of Christ — ^perhaps because at this period 
the parent image has to be sacrificed to the 
new sex love and this sacrifice colors the 
whole imconscious ideal. The self-sacrifice 
continues in love for a mate, for children, 
for the family. And always the herd in- 
stinct, that seeks the approval of our 
fellows, operates to make the ideal of value 
to society. Such a Hero Wish is the true 
Will of any "psyche** — ^the strongest thing 
in life. And it is the calamity of our re- 
ligion and our morality that we have marked 
so many of the strongest impulses of the 
"psyche" as "base animal impulses,'* and 
fought them blindly, and condemned them 
as having their source in "original sin." 

237 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

What is the psyche? Psychoanalysts use 
the word ** psyche," apparently, to avoid the 
theological implications of the word *'soul." 
The psyche is the ego, the personality, if 
you please, that uses both the conscious 
and the subconscious minds in its self- 
expression. And it has aspects in which it 
seems to be superior to both and independent 
of them. Let me conclude with two cases 
of the kind from Doctor X*s experience. 

He had a patient — ^an architect, let us 
say — ^who was unsuccessful in his profession 
because he gave so much time and effort 
to impaid work. He was trying to make 
his native town a **city beautiful," and he 
was neglecting his proper work in order to 
assist in campaigns of city planning and 
civic center schemes and organized projects 
for various civic improvements. Doctor X 
coimseled him that he should devote himself 
first to gainful work for the support of 
himself and his family, and then use his 
surplus of time and money for the altruistic 
efforts which were now ruining him. After 
receiving this advice, the patient reported 
a peculiar dream. He had been standing 
on a plain, looking up at a "city beautiful" 
that had been built on a higher plateau 
and rather in the clouds. Some imknown 
companion was with him. After admiring 

238 



IN RELIGION 

the city a moment, he said to this companion, 
''That's all very fine, but it's not on the 
level/* And the other replied, "You're 
not looking at it from the proper angle." 

He reported this dream to the doctor 
without any suspicion of what it meant. 
"It meant," says the doctor, "that he had a 
doubt of my cotmsel — ^that he considered 
my advice, about using only his surplus 
time and money in furthering his city 
beautiful, advice that was perhaps not on 
the level. Accordingly, I explained myself 
in more detail, and he finally accepted the 
advice as good. As a matter of fact, he 
had not been looking at my proposal from 
the proper angle — ^as the companion in his 
dream knew. But what faculty of the sub- 
conscious mind was it that knew and gave 
me the warning that he thought my advice 
was not on the level, and that he so thought 
because he was not looking at the matter 
from the proper angle?" 

In another case the doctor had been try- 
ing for months to tmcover a very deep 
repression of guilt that was ruining a patient's 
health. The dreams which the patient re- 
ported showed that he was struggling to 
confess what the concealed offense had been. 
The doctor kept on, encouraged. The 
patient, at last, "came through"; and the 

239 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

doctor began confidently to build up a cure. 
His confidence was checked by the account 
of another dream, in which the patient — 
although he was imaware of it — ^had repre- 
sented the doctor as raking in a dust heap, 
picking up a glittering object of no value, 
and bearing it away with fatuous pride and 
self-satisfaction. 

"The patient's psyche,'* Doctor X says, 
"was making fun of me. It was also warn- 
ing me that the repression which I had 
imcovered was not the real cause of the 
trouble. It was giving me this warning 
over the patient's head, so to speak, without 
his knowledge. So warned, I went to work 
on him again and found that the psyche 
was jeering at me with good cause. Below 
the first repression wai. a much more serious 
one which the patient finally confessed, and 
I was able to start him, with a clean bill, 
on the road to health." 

If this psyche is not what we call a soul, 
what is it? 

"The great dynamic wish of the imcon- 
scious mind," says Doctor X, "is the wish 
for personal power and for immortality. 
The tmconscious mind has no record of 
personal death. It is, so to speak, con- 
vinced of its immortality. When you dream 
of yourself dead, you see yourself standing 

240 



IN RELIGION 

beside your dead body, as the child does 
when he wishes himself dead in order to 
grieve his parents, and sees himself revenged 
by their sorrow. Now, the goal of omnip- 
otence and immortality is no less than the 
wish to be a god. Think what this means! 
You have a mind nine-tenths of which is 
unconscious, but none the less dynamic with 
the fixed goal of being godlike. And you 
set up your pimy reason as a combatant 
against the force of this giant wisher who 
would be a god. 

''Therein lies the secret of the power of 
the creed of Christ; for whether you believe 
that Christ is a God who became a man or 
a man who became a God, his creed is the 
union of a conscious belief with an uncon- 
scious conviction. And no matter where 
the unconscious mind obtained that con- 
viction, this practical result ensues: the 
cure and restoration of a defective person- 
ality is not possible, in my experience, \ v 
if the patient has lost his belief in the/ j 
immortality of the soul. As soon as the'j 
process of mental analysis shows me that; 
the patient has a fixed atheism, I drop the J 
case. I have learned from many failures j 
that I have here no foundation on which to » 
build, that I am working in quicksand. 

''I do not mean that I have any scien- 
241 



THE SECRET SPRINGS 

tific proof that man has a soul or that it 
IS immortal. But I have abtindant proof 
that he acts unconsciously as if he had an 
immortal soul, and that I cannot restore 
him ultimately to health and happiness 
unless he acts in conscious accordance with 
this unconscious conviction. There is a 
power in him which we cannot see any more 
than we can see the electricity in the cable, 
but we can use that power in his living 
engine exactly as we can use electricity to 
drive a motor, and if he consciously blocks 
that power he loses energy or he stalls 
completely. For my purposes as a phy- 
sician, then, man is an animal with an im- 
mortal soul; and the fact that this is true 
in practice is the greatest proof to me that 
it is true in fact.'* 

POSTSCRIPT 

Several chapters of this book were pub- 
lished serially in the Cosmopolitan Magazine 
during the winter of 1919-20. They were re- 
ceived by many readers with the suspicion 
that " Doctor X " was an imaginary physician 
and his cases fictitious. Many others pleaded 
to be given his name so that they might con- 
sult him. It became impossible to preserve 
his anonymity. As the series continued, his 

242 



IN RELIGION 

identity was disclosed, for one reason or an- 
other, to so large a ntimber of persons that 
the secret has now become a secret of Poli- 
chinelle. One might as well make an impar- 
tial end of it and confess that he is Dr. 
Edward H. Reede of Washington, D. C. 



THE END 



Revelations 
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A YEAR AS A GOVERNMENT AGENT 

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Mrs. Norman Whitehouse was sent to 
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Set down by William Hard 

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